MARY OF GALILEE, VOL. 3

MARY OF GALILEE, VOL. 3

Volume Three in the trilogy on the Blessed Virgin Mary is a study of the apocryphal and patristic texts of a truly golden age in Church history. It retells the Marian stories, narratives, and reader-responses of the Christian faithful during the first five centuries of Christianity. In this volume we retrace the gradual, almost imperceptible, growth in the Church's understanding of the mystery of Mary's role in the Incarnation of Christ and his Redemption of the world. As Jesus was seen not only as Lord (Kyrios) but also as the Creative Power behind all that is (Pantokrator), Mary began to be seen now as more than the virgin mother of Luke's and Matthew's Gospels. She was being extolled as the God- bearer (Theotokos), or in the more radical theological interpretation of that word in Latin, Mater Dei, the Mother of God. In a highly selective sampling of the twenty plus personalities dealt with in this volume, the author attempts to capture the spirit as well as the letter of what was being said of Mary in both the Eastern and Western Churches. A chapter on Islam's veneration of Mary concludes this veritable treasure trove of insights into the Church's devotion to the Mother of God as set forth in our day and age by the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, Chapter VIII.

About the Author: Bertrand Buby, SM, a member of the Society of Mary, is on the faculty of the University of Dayton and associated with the International Marian Research Institute there. The author of several articles on Mary for Marian Studies, Biblical Theology Bulletin, and Review for Religious, he is the translator of Ignace de la Potterie's Mary in the Mystery of the Covenant (New York: Alba House, 1992).