The Blessed Virgin Mary is uniquely associated with Catholicism, and the century preceding the Second Vatican Council was arguably the most fertile era for Catholic Marian studies. In 1964, Pope John Paul VI published the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, or Lumen Gentium (LG), the eighth chapter of which presents the most comprehensive magisterial teaching on the Blessed Virgin Mary. As part of its Marian Initiative, the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame invited scholars to a conference held at Notre Dame in October 2013 to reflect the rich Marian legacy on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. The essays unanimously stress that the Blessed Virgin Mary is not merely a peripheral figure in Christian faith and in the panorama of theology. More than fifty years after Lumen Gentium, students of theology as well as Marian devotees take their bearings from this document in order to promote the person of Mary and the study of Mariology, as well as grow in authenti...
Biomedical Engineering in Gastrointestinal Surgery is a combination of engineering and surgical experience on the role of engineering in gastrointestinal surgery. There is currently no other book that combines engineering and clinical issues in this field, while engineering is becoming more and more important in surgery. This book is written to a high technical level, but also contains clear explanations of clinical conditions and clinical needs for engineers and students. Chapters covering anatomy and physiology are comprehensive and easy to understand for non-surgeons, while technologies are put into the context of surgical disease and anatomy for engineers. The authors are the two most senior members of the Institute for Minimally Invasive Interdisciplinary Therapeutic Interventions (MITI), which is pioneering this kind of collaboration between engineers and clinicians in minimally invasive surgery. MITI is an interdisciplinary platform for collaborative work of surgeons, gastroente...