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Terms Z

Zipoli, Domenico (1688-1726)

Italian Jesuit scholastic; baroque composer and musician; missioner to Paraguay "reductions"

As a young man, Domenico Zipoli studied with Alessandro Scarlati and other recognized masters. At the age of 28 he joined the Jesuits and a year later went to serve in the Paraguay mission. There he did his greatest work in music for the native people. After only nine years on the mission, he died, not yet ordained. The Boston College Jesuit musicologist T. Frank Kennedy has devoted considerable attention to Zipoli. See, for example, "Music and the Jesuit Mission in the New World,"Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (Autumn 2007).

Zubiri, Xavier (1898-1983)

Spanish (Basque) philosopher

Zubiri's epistemology of "sentient intelligence" provided the foundations of Ignacio Ellacuria's philosophy of "historical reality," giving academic, university expression to what he learned from Archbishop Oscar Romero's "love and reverence for the [crucified] Salvadoran people as the human face of God" (Robert Lassalle-Klein).

Zubiri taught that sensation and intelligence, which in Western philosophy had been separated from each other in both idealism and empiricisim, are two elements of the same act or operation, which he called "sentient intelligence." This position of Zubiri's (Lassalle-Klein claims) has been confirmed by subsequent neuroscience. Its "fidelity to reality" means that all of reality is allowed in to the knowing subject from the beginning without parts being lost in a process of discrete stages. Thus reality makes a powerful ethical claim on the knower who cannot screen out anything to "protect" himself/herself from reality's full force.

Think of this in the specific and concrete as the full reality of the suffering people of Salvador with their systematic intimidation and subjugation through repeated acts of violence, torture, and murder by a Salvadoran government under the control of a tiny elite of the wealthy and powerful in conjunction with a U.S.-trained and funded military and paramilitary that acts with total impunity. This was the "historical reality" with which Romero in his pastoral work and Ellacuría and his companions (Jesuit and lay) in their university work had to deal as they carried out their preferential option for the "crucified" poor.

^{See Lassalle-Klein, Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America}

^{(Orbis, 2014), ch. 5.}

Zucchi, Nicolas (1586-1670)

Italian Jesuit; designer of one of the earliest reflecting telescopes

An Italian astronomer and professor who designed one of the earliest reflecting telescopes by constructing an apparatus which uses a lens to observe the image focused from a concave mirror. With this telescope, Zucchi discovered two belts of the planet Jupiter and examined the spots on Mars (1640). This was the model for many of the later designs by scientists such as James Gregory and Isaac Newton. Zucchius Crater on the moon is named in his honor.

^{A list of Jesuit scientists}