A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall of North Korean capital Pyongyang in the early stages of the Korean War. Part of the very rare breed of Parachute Chaplains, in his case with the 101 st Airborne Division, Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstroms of the 20th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest of times and the most difficult of circumstances.

This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre (Catholic U of America Press, 2023) contains material on his service during the Korean War and occupation duty in Germany and Japan as well as the Second World War, with a new historical introduction by University of Scranton Professor Sean Brennan.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

The defining feature of this textbook is the treatment of classical and New Testament Greek as one language using primary sources. All the example sentences the students will translate are real Greek sentences, half of which are taken from classical literature and philosophy and half of which are directly from the New Testament. The advantage of this approach is that it highlights the linguistic, literary, and historical connections between classical Greece and early Christianity. Rather than having students memorize isolated tables and artificial sentences, Michael Boler spent years combing through thousands of pages of literature, philosophy, and scripture to find short, powerful sentences that not only teach the grammatical concepts in each chapter, but also contain seeds of wisdom that will spark wonder and discussion.

Introduction to Classical and New Testament Greek: A Unified Approach (Catholic U of America Press, 2019) is born out of classroom experience in a Catholic liberal arts university whose students were disappointed to be forced to choose between textbooks that taught classical Greek in isolation and ones that focused exclusively on the New Testament. By the end of this book, students will have read over 200 lines of scripture and an equal amount of ancient literature from Homer to Aristotle. They will also have the grammatical knowledge to continue to read classical and New Testament Greek. Each chapter contains a section at the end that delves deeply into the etymology and background of the words and passages encountered in the respective chapter. Professors will thus be able to use these chapters as a bridge to philosophical, theological, historical, and literary topics that will enrich the class.

Michael Boler is director and associate professor of classics as well as the director of the honors programs at University of St. Thomas, Houston.

Justin McGeary is director of Christian studies at John Witherspoon College, a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Union School of Theology, Wales, and tutor at Trinity House Tutorials.

A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall of North Korean capital Pyongyang in the early stages of the Korean War. Part of the very rare breed of Parachute Chaplains, in his case with the 101 st Airborne Division, Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstroms of the 20th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest of times and the most difficult of circumstances.

This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre (Catholic U of America Press, 2023) contains material on his service during the Korean War and occupation duty in Germany and Japan as well as the Second World War, with a new historical introduction by University of Scranton Professor Sean Brennan.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

Revered by contemporaries and posterity for both his sanctity and his scholarship, Bede (672-735) is a pivotal figure in the history of the Church. Known primarily as an historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede was also an accomplished pedagogue, hagiographer, and biblical scholar. Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality (Catholic U of America Press, 2022) takes a fresh look at this classic Christian thinker, exploring the gamut of Bede's literary corpus. The book investigates key themes, including Bede's understanding of the theological significance of time, his conception of the relationship between the temporal and eternal orders within history, his theological use of rhetoric, his foray into narrative theology, and his spirituality.

The purpose of this volume is to introduce the reader to principal theological themes in Bede's thought. Bequette's thesis is that Bede was a theologian writing in continuity with the Christian tradition and yet making creative, original contributions to that tradition for the sake of his contemporaries, both in the monastery and in the culture at large. The method involves a close reading and analysis of key texts within Bede's corpus of writings. These texts include the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Life of St Cuthbert, and several of Bede's biblical commentaries (On the Tabernacle, On the Temple) his homilies, and didactic treatises (On the Reckoning of Time, Concerning Figures and Tropes in Sacred Scripture). Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality constitutes a scholarly study of Bede's thought as an integral whole, identifying key themes and ideas that pervade his writings. Thus, it can serve as an introduction to Bede's thought for non-specialists in the areas of theology, religious studies, and other areas of the humanities.

John Bequette is professor of philosophy and theology at the University of St. Francis (Ind.)

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a British historian who was deeply shaken by the Great War (1914-1918) and sought to explore the history of different cultures and religions to understand the catastrophe that had befallen the modern world. In doing so, Dawson would develop a “cultural mind” that served to guide his style of scholarship; it was interdisciplinary by nature (incorporating anthropology, sociology, history, and comparative religion). This ran contrary to the prevalent academic trend towards specialization that continues to this day. To explore the scholarly achievement of Christopher Dawson is the subject of Joseph T. Stuart’s Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War (‎The Catholic University of America Press, 2022).

Joseph T. Stuart is Associate Professor of History and Fellow in Catholic Studies at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, USA. H grew up in rural Michigan and have taught in Canada, onion-farmed in Texas, and lived in Scotland for several years during graduate school at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Edinburgh. He also has a degree in land surveying from Ferris State University and have worked in that field in Michigan and North Dakota. Inspired by the historian Christopher Dawson, his research and writing concern the history of culture.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States: A History (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) provides a comprehensive history of Jesuit higher education in the United States, weaving together the stories of the fifty-four colleges and universities that the Jesuits have operated (successfully and unsuccessfully) since 1789. It emphasizes the connections among the institutions, exploring how certain Jesuit schools like Georgetown University gave birth to others like Boston College by sharing faculty, financial resources, accreditation, and even presidents throughout their history. The book also explores how the colleges responded to common challenges – including anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States, the push from government authorities to modernize their shared curriculum, and the pull from Roman authorities to remain loyal to Catholic tradition.

The story is comprehensive, covering the colonial era to the present, and takes a fresh look at themes like the rise of the research university in the 1880s and the administrative reforms of the 1960s. It also provides a modern and timely perspective on the role of Jesuit colleges in racial justice, women’s education, and other civil rights issues, drawing attention to underappreciated Jesuit contributions in these areas. It draws from both published and archival sources on the history of each institution to construct a single narrative, identifying common themes, challenges, and trends. Through the eyes of Jesuit colleges, it traces the evolution of American higher education and the role of Catholics in the United States over more than two centuries.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of (the city of) St. Augustine, who came to Florida from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, and remain to this day. It also tells the story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia, who sprang from the motherhouse in St. Augustine.

A significant part of the book is a comparison of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work against that of their major rivals, missionaries from the Protestant American Missionary Association. Using letters the Sisters wrote back to their motherhouse in France, the book provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional (pun intended) lives of these women religious in St. Augustine and other parts of Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth century through the era of anti-Catholicism in the early twentieth century South. It carries the story through 1922, the end of the pioneer years of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work in Florida, and the end of Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia’s existence as a distinct order. Through the lenses of Catholicism, Florida and Southern history, gender, and race, the book addresses the Protestant concept of domesticity and how it was reinforced in Catholic terms by women who seemingly defied the ideal. It also relates the Sisters’ contributions in shaping life in the South during Reconstruction as they established elite academies and free schools, created orphanages, ministered to all during severe yellow fever epidemics, and fought the specter of anti-Catholicism as it crept across the rural regions of the country. To date, little has been written about Catholics in the South, much less the women religious who served there. This book helps to fill that gap.

Teaching in Black and White provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional lives of women religious in Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This valuable primary source collection also contains a historical introduction written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at the University of Scranton.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

Philp Fabian Flynn led a remarkable life, bearing witness to some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century. Flynn took part in the invasions of Sicily and Normandy, the Battle of Aachen, and the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. He acted as confessor to Nazi War Criminals during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, assisted Hungarian Revolutionaries on the streets of Budapest, and assisted the waves of refugees arriving in Austria feeling the effects of ethnic and political persecution during the Cold War. The Priest Who Put Europe Back Together: The Life of Rev. Fabian Flynn, CP (Catholic U of America Press, 2018) tells the story of this fascinating life. From solidly middle-class beginnings in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Flynn interacted with and occasionally advised some of the major political, military, and religious leaders of his era. His legacy as a Passionist priest, a chaplain in the US Army, and an official in the Catholic Relief Services was both vast and enormously beneficial. His life and career symbolized the "coming of age" of the United States as a global superpower, and the corresponding growth of the American Catholic Church as an international institution. Both helped liberate half of Europe from Fascist rule, and then helped to rebuild its political, economic, and social foundations, which led to an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. His efforts on behalf of both his country and his Church to contain Communist influence, and to assist the refugees of its tyranny, contributed to its collapse. Flynn was one of the hundreds of Americans who put Europe back together after a period of horrendous self-destruction. In a twentieth century filled with villains and despots, Flynn played a heroic and vital role in extraordinary times.

Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also the Communications Assistant for the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). His general interest is in American religious history, especially American Catholicism.

A central theological and philosophical problem facing Christians is the question “How could a merciful God damn people to hell?” It is tempting to solve this issue by developing an image of God that leaves out mercy or an understanding of Christian doctrine that rejects the concept of hell. In his new book, Hell and the Mercy of God (Catholic University of America Press, 2017), Adrian Reimers takes up this challenge. In this thought-provoking work, Reimers does not simply seek to resolve this apparent contradiction, but reveals the connections between Gods mercy and hell while embracing the ambiguity of human existence. Philosophers and theologians in particular will find this work useful, but it is so clear that students, and even historians like myself, will be able to understand it.