The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits

Abstract

The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits deal with close to five hundred years of history of the Society of Jesus, a transnational, polyglot Catholic religious order of men, which rose vertiginously to prominence from the mid-sixteenth century until its suppression in 1773. Following this unprecedented event in Church history was its equally unprecedented Restoration in 1814. What held this corporate Jesuit body together through a series of historically documented successes, adjustments, crises and persecutions, and made it continuously cohere around a set of common ideals, commitments and practices? Was it a sense of a “higher goal” cultivated through methodical self-questioning taught by Spiritual Exercises and by observing the rules written in the Constitutions? Toolkits of subjection and subjectivity, fostering discipline as well as collective effervescence among both the Jesuits and their lay supporters - and their enemies - are analyzed in this volume through major topics, events and institutions. Thorn between private and public, religious and secular, “us” and “them”, the Jesuits perfected the art of introspection and the reflection on strategies and mechanisms on how to link individual to society. Today as in the past, even though the Jesuits were and are under obligation to think and act for the Catholic Church, in executing their tasks they exceeded and widened the strictly ecclesiastical boundaries and made major contributions to the secular culture. In the last forty years, in particular, the problem of social justice and ecologically responsible global order are invoked as the most urgent Jesuit concerns. A comprehensive analysis regarding the manner in which the Jesuits set up, acted on, described and analyzed, and they still do, the intercultural and transnational networks - invigorating projects as questionable as the Inquisition, slavery and conversion, as innovative and experimental as accommodation, inculturation and social justice, as useful as education and scholarship - is offered in this volume by more than forty authors, senior and young experts in the field, three of whom are Jesuits themselves.