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Throughout history members of the Society of Jesus, popularly known as Jesuits, have been accused of killing kings and presidents, have traveled as missionaries to every corner of the globe, founded haciendas in Mexico, explored the Mississippi and Amazon rivers, and served Chinese emperors as map makers, painters, and astronomers. As well as the predictable roll call of saints and martyrs, the Society can also lay claim to the thirty-five craters on the moon named for Jesuit scientists. Jesuits have been despised and idolized on a scale unknown to members of any other religious order; they have died the most horrible deaths and done the most outlandish deeds.

Whether loved or loathed, the Jesuits’ dramatic and wide-ranging impact could never be ignored. By the mid-eighteenth century, they had established more than 650 educational institutions. They were also strongly committed to foreign missions, and like the secular explorers and settlers of the Age of Discovery, they traveled to the Far East, India, and the Americas to stake a claim. They were especially successful in Latin America, where they managed to put numerous villages entirely under Jesuit rule.

The Jesuits’ successes both in Europe and abroad, coupled with rumors of scandal and corruption within the order, soon drew criticism from within the Church and without. Writers such as Pascal and Voltaire wrote polemics against them, and the absolute monarchs of Catholic Europe sought to destroy them. Their power was seen as so threatening that hostility escalated into serious political feuds, and at various times they were either banned or harshly suppressed throughout Europe.

God’s Soldiers is a fascinating chronicle of this celebrated, mysterious, and often despised religious order. Jonathan Wright illuminates as never before their enduring contributions as well as the controversies that surrounded them. The result is an in-depth, unbiased, and utterly compelling history.

In considering the issue which has divided Christians in the past and still divides them today, a group of Orthodox theologians from different theological perspectives reflect upon the scriptural passages which single out Peter among the disciples of Jesus. Koulomzine ("Peter's Place in the Primitive Church") and Kesich ("Peter's Primacy in the New Testament and the Early Tradition"), as exegetes, read the passages in the light of contemporary New Testament research. John Meyendorff ("St Peter in Byzantine Theology") looks at the history of exegesis: how were these passages read at the time when East and West split, quarrelling about the issue of authority in the Church? Finally, Schmemann ("The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology") and Afanassieff ("The Church Which Presides in Love") look at the meaning of "primacy" as a permanent, through changing, factor of "catholic" ecclesiology.

At a time when an ecumenical reconciliation between Rome and Eastern Christianity appears possible'but when new tensions (or are they actually the old ones?) are surging again'these studies set forth the Orthodox position of the primacy of Peter.

CONTRIBUTORS: John Meyendorff is dean and professor of church history and patristics at St Vladimir's Seminary; Alexander Schmemann (†1983) was dean of St Vladimir's Seminary and taught church history and liturgical theology (1962-1983); Nicholas Afanassieff (†1966) was a professor of canon law and church history at the Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris; Nicholas Koulomzine is a professor of New Testament at the Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris; Veselin Kesich is professor emeritus of New Testament at St Vladimir's Seminary.

The simplicity, ruggedness, and clarity of the Dominicans' biblically-based, Christ-centered spirituality is illustrated in Jean de Mailly's Life of St. Dominic, The Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic,and the writings of Jordan of Saxony, Peter of Rheims, Thomas Agni, and Robert Kilwardby. The importance of preaching in the Dominican tradition is reflected in the book's main selection, Humbert of Romans' Treatise on the Formation of Preachers.