Search results for ""St Augustine's Press""

The Catholic “thing” – the concrete historical reality of Catholicism as a presence in human history – is the richest cultural tradition in the world. It values both faith and reason, and therefore has a great deal to say about politics and economics, war and peace, manners and morals, children and families, careers and vocations, and many other perennial and contemporary questions. In addition, it has inspired some of the greatest art, music, and architecture, while offering unparalleled human solidarity to tens of millions through hospitals, soup kitchens, schools, universities, and relief services. This volume brings together some of the very best commentary on a wide range of recent events and controversies by some of the very best Catholic writers in the English language: Ralph McInerny, Michael Novak, Fr. James V. Schall, Hadley Arkes, Robert Royal, Anthony Esolen, Brad Miner, George Marlin, David Warren, Austin Ruse, Francis Beckwith, and many others. Their contributions cover large Catholic subjects such as philosophy and theology, liturgy and Church dogma, postmodern culture, the Church and modern politics, literature, and music. But they also look into specific contemporary problems such as religious liberty, the role of Catholic officials in public life, growing moral hazards in bio-medical advances, and such like. The Catholic Thing is a virtual encyclopedia of Catholic thought about modern life.

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Catholicism continues to experience an exponential growth in Africa. Going by the figures and the intensity of religious practice, Africa can unarguably be described as the new center of the Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. With over 236 million Catholics, Africa considers itself as having come of age and capable of making its voice heard on matters pertaining to global Catholicism/Christianity. And if there is a contemporary theologian greatly loved and admired by African scholars, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI ranks premium on that list. His convening a second synod on Africa on the theme of justice, peace and reconciliation, further endeared him to the African theologians. This book is a testimony to the affection that the Church in Africa has for Benedict XVI. In effect, as Africa finds its voice on the stage of global Catholicism, the theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI provides a fruitful space for Africa's engagement with the wider Church. Benedict XVI described Africa as the spiritual lung of the world. This volume testifies to the vitality and healthiness of that lung, a must read for all interested in African Catholicism and its definite impact on global Christianity as a whole.

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What role did Humanism play in the emergence of English Protestantism? This question has remained a live issue for Reformation scholarship over the past four centuries. In The Ark, the Covenant, and the Poor Men’s Chest, the author examines the issue in detail, utilizing categories drawn from the research of John W. O’Malley on the application of different modes of classical rhetoric to biblical interpretation during the Renaissance. Anyone interested in either the revival of classical learning during the Renaissance or the religious upheaval of the English Reformation will benefit from reading this work. The book’s focus on primary sources from the sixteenth century and the best insights from recent secondary scholarship yields insights that will be of great interest to specialists in the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies. The inclusion of a timeline of major events, a biographical index of major figures, and a glossary of theological terms make this work accessible and helpful for students with varying degrees of familiarity with early modern England. Comparing the exegetical writings of Erasmus and John Colet, the author illustrates the key differences between Erasmian and Italian Humanism. Erasmus’ reliance upon deliberative oratory for the explication of scripture, and his preoccupation with a Platonic philosophia Christi, result in an oracular Christology, focused narrowly on the speech of Jesus. By contrast, Italian Humanism relies upon epideictic rhetoric, and yields a portrait of Christ that highlights the deeds of the Messiah and the paschal dimensions of His salvific work, as seen in the writings of John Colet. These divergent patterns of biblical interpretation are also characteristic of the writings of the two bishops of London during the Reformation, Edmund Bonner (imprisoned under Edward VI, and returned to his diocese by Mary Tudor), and Nicholas Ridley (assistant and confidant to Thomas Cranmer). Their contrasting approaches to scriptural interpretation suggest that opting for either Italian or Erasmian Humanism may have been decisive, both for Ridley’s Protestantism and Bonner’s Catholicism.

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With great foresight and vision for the Church, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI carefully integrated theological, catechetical and pastoral themes in the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Africae Munus. Maurice A. Agbaw-Ebai and Matthew Levering, in the introduction to this collection of reflections and studies focused on the Pope Emeritus’ themes, affirm the African continent’s status as a global center for the growth of the Catholic Church in the twenty-first century and the future of the international Catholic community. Building on the vitality and enthusiasm of the Church in Africa, it is important to lift their faith through scholarly research and academic reflections. We cannot fully appreciate the dedication, commitment and perseverance of the Catholic community throughout the African continent if we do not know the truth of their sufferings and persecution and understand their resilience in the light of faith. This collection, drawn from the halls of academia, provides an important contribution to the understanding and advancement of Catholic Africa, following the insights and enlightenment of Pope Emeritus Benedict. It is my hope that these essays will enrich your understanding and experience of the Catholic faith. — From the Preface by Seán Patrick Cardinal O’Malley

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Philosophy means “the love of wisdom.” Kreeft uses the dialogues of Socrates to help the reader grow in that love. He says that no master of the art of philosophizing has ever been more simple, clear, and accessible to beginners as has Socrates. He focuses on Plato’s dialogues, the Apology of Socrates, as a lively example to imitate, and a model partner for the reader for dialogue. Kreeft calls it “the Magna Carta of philosophy,” a timeless classic that is “a portable classroom.”

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Kreeft presents a Socratic examination of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in relation to the skepticism of Hume, posing questions that challenge the concepts that Hume proposed. Kreeft states that Hume is the “most formidable, serious, difficult-to-refute skeptic in the history of modern thought.” Kreeft invites the reader to take part in the process of refuting Hume’s skeptical arguments, with the great insights of Socrates. Based on an imagination dialogue between Socrates and Hume that takes place in the afterlife, this profound and witty book makes an entertaining and informative exploration of modern philosophy.

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William Morrisey unravels Melville’s “loomings” of the great whale, showing them to be important threads of politics and theories of governance. The Young America of Melville’s day valorized popular sovereignty such that moral law suppressed by the majority rule was bringing America to state of being that could only then be ruled by the mightiest of the mighty––the great Leviathan, who reigns in the boundless chaotic sea separated from “stable land.” The force of the created world and the necessary ordering achieved through conquest are dominating themes of Melville’s great tale, but as Morrisey observes approaching the great whale, ruler of the untamable seas, is for captain (ruler) an opportunity to destroy it. But for the sailor (the ruled) being close to the white whale is a moment for understanding, and in turn of being understood. Yet in what sense is being seen, for human beings of moral bearings, not also an impulse to self-impose? “The modern Ishmael wants to see, not to kill, perhaps to be seen, and surely not to be killed. Americans too need to come to terms with the white whale, if they are to perceive reality as it is without bringing destruction upon themselves.” Is Melville proposing an utterly new philosophy of ruler and ruled, of a proper gauge of the immeasurable chaos that is nature? “Does Melville also intend to be a founder in the ‘New World’?” Morrisey’s study is a compelling look at the early political moments of a new nation, but one that at the time perceived itself as already aging and maturing in the process of political voyage and adventure. Dangers lie ahead, Melville seems to warn, and in his disenchantment of the vigor of the Young America he once endorsed he tells the story of what really happens when democracy is idealized and the surrounding waters of chaos are thereby veiled; and yet also of what happens when one would seek to command the chaos only to transform into the unpredictably destructive prey he pursues, especially under the guise of moral outrage. Melville, like Ishmael, urges a new vision of both God and nature, and challenges the notion of rule in all its expressions. Americans, the people of the New World, are invited to be unafraid, but also careful. In wandering as on the open waters one wonders, beyond civic boundaries and conventions, and in that wonder one may finally come face to face with what is good and grand––but in beholding the great white whale, can one resist the urge to conquest, now that he is likewise by the leviathan beholden? Is the rule of man and the coronation of a specific dialectic of power an untenable victory, given that “‘Nature is nobody’s ally’: it wounds or kills any person or nation that violates it, impartially”? Morrisey writes with lucidity and weaves together elements of history, literature, politics and perhaps his own affinity for Ishmael’s passenger spirit to reveal just how broad and boundless of a narrative Melville’s Moby Dick truly is.

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Peter Fraser revisits stories told onscreen that in different ways all convey clear and ringing truths and touch the deepest human chords. Spanning different time periods and cultures, Twelve Films about Love and Heaven speaks to the hearts of those who cry at old movies and the old abiding Faith, and who believe a well-written book is always worth the time. It is a reminder to both artists and spectators that the pursuit of virtue, and above all in our family roles, is the greatest of adventures and the most glorious of victories.

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God and the City, based on the Aquinas Lecture delivered at the University of Dallas in 2022, aims to think about politics ontologically. In other words, it seeks to reflect on, not some political theory or other, nor on the legitimacy of political action or the distinctiveness of particular regimes, but on the nature of political order as such, and how this order implicates the fundamental questions of existence, those concerning man, being, and God. Aristotle, and Aquinas after him, identified metaphysics and politics as “architectonic” sciences, since each concerns in some respect the whole of reality, of which the particular sciences study a part. Chapter one of this book argues that, just as metaphysics, in studying being as a whole, cannot but address the question of God in some respect, so too does politics, the ordering of human life as a whole, necessarily implicate the existence of God. In this regard, the modern liberal project has deluded itself in attempting to render religion a private, rather than a genuinely political, matter. We cannot organize human existence without making some claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the nature of God and God’s relation to the world. The second chapter approaches this theme from the anthropological dimension. As Plato affirmed, the “city is the soul writ large”: if man is religious by nature, he cannot be properly understood, and the human good cannot be properly secured and fostered, if the “God question” is “bracketed out” of the properly political order. Moreover, if we fail to recognize the essentially political dimension of relation to God, we will be unable properly to grasp the presence of God in the (ecclesial and sacramental) Body of Christ: God cannot be real in the Church as Church unless he is also real in the city as city (and vice versa). In his De regno, Aquinas famously affirms that “the king is to be in the kingdom what the soul is in the body and what God is in the world.” Chapter three offers a careful study of the body-soul relationship in order to illuminate, on the one hand, the nature of political authority, and, on the other, the precise way that God is present in human community.

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To mark the 40th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical on human work, published in 1981, a group of globally-recognized scholars presents the critical aspects of this document and its purpose. These original essays revisit John Paul II's approach to work in post-modern society and reconnect the dignity of the working person to a pursuit of holiness. These authors convey that only when it is truly Christian can humanism accomplish the lofty ideals it indicates. This book is a timely contribution to the field of scholarship that focuses on Catholic Social Thought and is ideally suited for graduate studies and the reader interested in more serious questions in Christian theology. Giulio Maspero, "The Bible and the Fathers of the Church on Work" Patricia Ranft, "Work Theology in the High Middle Ages" Angela Franks, "John Paul II's Metaphysics of Labor" Deborah Savage, "Confronting a Technocratic Future: Women's Work and the Church's Social Vision" Martin Schlag, "Contemplation at Work: A Theological Conversation Between John Paul II and Josemaría Escrivá" Richard Turnbull, "Laborem Exercens: A Protestant Appreciation" Michael Naughton, "Good Work: Insights from the Subjective Dimension of Work" Christopher Michaelson, "Subjects and Objects in Meaningful Work" Javier Ignacio Pinto Garay and Alvaro Pezoa Bissieres, "The Worker and the Transistor: The Dignity of Work and Business Ethics in Global Corporate Practices" Gonzalo Flores-Castro Lingán, "The Real Work: Making the Encyclical Laborem Exercens Operational" Geoffrey C. Friesen, "Laborem Exercens and the Subjective Dimension of Work in Economics and Finance"

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Michael Davis revisits questions of interpretation in Greek tragedy emerging in the thought of the late Seth Benardete. While this is not the book Benardete would have written, it wrestles with problems that bear his indelible mark. In the extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, only one story is treated by all three––the tale of Electra. Davis endeavors to develop Benardete's understanding of the story's deeper meaning, as well as the connections that might be drawn between the three authors. He follows a thread that brings Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides closer together according to a powerful and shared theme––namely, that the female is the deeper (even if less easily accessible and articulated) of the pair of fundamental principles constituting human beings. Davis accomplishes much more than an exegetical bridge as he connects us with ancient memory and wisdom. "When we cannot resist the temptation to recoil morally from their terminology, we risk the tragedy of losing their profound thoughts about our humanity––their philosophical anthropology." Davis has remarkably made of a niche study a stunning source material for more universal questions. This is a book that is as timely as it is ageless.

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"This book fits into a sequence of books I have written in which writers are used to throw light on their times, and vice versa, a sequence beginning with Fleming, Shakespeare and Austen, and continuing with Dickens, Christie, Doyle, Fielding, Smollett and the Gothic novelists. I have found the approach a fascinating one, not least in leading me to re-read much from earlier years. […] This study is not a biography, in whole or part, of Defoe. […] Instead of biography, we have here a study of Britain in the Age of Defoe, a work intended to throw light on his life and to benefit from a close reading of his works, but also to stand on its own separate to an engagement with the author himself. The range of Defoe’s interest and the extent of his writings would make the latter a different task, as indeed any attempt to offer an easy coherence to personality, career and works. Yet, Defoe can be approached as a traveller, both literally so, and in his interests and imagination. […] In his range of interests, vigorous engagement with life and issues, often polemical content and style, and willingness to engage with low life, Defoe prefigures Tobias Smollett, another writer covered in this series and, to a lesser extent, Henry Fielding, who can be more ‘polite.’ Defoe was an outsider, as Smollett was to be, but as Fielding certainly was not. ‘One whose business is observation,’ Defoe’s description of himself in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), captured, however, a pose as well as a reality, for he had values aplenty to offer. As a writer, Defoe brought together a reality usually presented as, and endorsed by, history, with the imaginative focus of storytelling, and the direction of, variously, propaganda, analysis, and exemplary tale." — Taken from the Preface

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This volume contains a translation into English of Averroes's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, an introduction to the translation in which the arguments of both Averroes and Aristotle are sketch out and their differences from Plato and other important thinkers explored, an outline analysis of the order of Averroes's commentary, annotations to the text, a bibliography, and a glossary of important terms with their English translations. Heretofore, non-Arabic readers have had to depend upon Hermannus Alemannus's Latin translation of Averroes's Middle Commentary or on its English version. Both are inadequate. They incorrectly render Averroes's various arguments and make his beautiful poetic citations read like doggerel. Moreover, they provide inaccurate and incomplete information about the sources of those citations and consequently portray Averroes's text as a curious compilation of relics from some exotic but not very learned horde. The present translation is based on a sound, critical Arabic edition prepared by the translator. Not only is it the first English translation from the Arabic original, but also the first translation of the Arabic text into any language other than medieval Hebrew or Latin. The translation is literal and eloquent, albeit more literal when eloquent when sense demands such a sacrifice. Throughout the commentary, the same English word is used for the same Arabic word unless an exception is noted. The renditions of the poetic citations are somewhat freer without reaching to unwarranted innovations.

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A series of important papers over the topics raised by Pope John Paul II in 'Fides et Ratio.' Contributors include Jude Dogherly, Rev. Servais Th. Pinckaers, O.P., William Hoye, Mario Enrique Sachhi, Benedict Ashley, O.P., Grace Goodell, Louis Chammings, Peter Hodgson, John Haldane, Steven Baldner, Vittorio Possenti, Hohn Hittnger, Christopher Martin, remi Brague, Michael Sherwin, O.P., Roger Poivet, Jennifer Hockenbury, John O'Callaghan, Alejandro Llano, and others.

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Received by the British press with equal acclaim and indignation, this book sets out to define and defend high culture against the world of pop, corn, and popcorn. It shows just why culture matters in an age without faith and gives an extended argument against the "post-modernist" world view.

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During his second stint as regent master of theology at the University of Paris in 1269-1272, Thomas Aquinas fulfilled the threefold magisterial task:'legere, disputare, praedicare' - to lecture, to dispute, to preach. 'On Virtues in General' and 'On the Cardinal Virtues' are two series of disputed questions which date from this period. In them Thomas, at the height of his powers and under the pressure of the raging dispute over Aristotle, discusses the central feature of his moral doctrine, virtue. During the same period was composing his commentrary on Aristotle's 'Nicomachean Ethics' and completing the moral part of the 'Summa Theologiae'. These disputed questions are the work of a theologian for whom philosophy was the necessary prerequisite of his discipline. Thomas discusses virtue with reference to the definitions of St. Augustine and Aristotle and develops a distinction between the acquired virtues and the virtues which are infused into the soul by grace. The subtle interactions of the natural and supernatural have never been discussed with more clarity. Justice, prudence, courage, and temperance - the cardinal virtues - are shown to have both acquired and infused instances.

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For Pieper, the study of tradition is anything but antiquarian. He begins with a consideration of tradition in a changing world and is well aware of the need to confront the all-too-common perception that “tradition” is nowadays irrelevant. On the basis of his profound knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, to modern Existentialism and Marxism, Pieper is able to highlight the values established – and challenged – down through the centuries. He sees the need to re-examine these values, to rid them of the false interpretations and misunderstandings that threaten to consign them to oblivion. He attempts to restate them in language which, in fact, not only reflects the clarity of his mind but also expresses his conviction that these values, freshly examined and understood, provide a sound basis for healthy living and for our survival against the dangers that pose a serious threat to the very existence of Western civilization. He illustrates these values by examining the contrast between an exponent of them, like Socrates, and an opportunist, like the Sophist Protagoras; between the man of principle and the nihilistic pragmatist. The book consists of a mixture of articles and speeches, produced by a man who, though often wooed by the academy, was not concerned with achieving personal status as an academic professor. He insisted, for the most part, in combining purely academic teaching with the education of teachers in teacher-training colleges. He would not be removed from close contact with “learners,” and he remained a “learner” himself – from tradition.

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David Lowenthal transposes present society onto that in the novel, 1984, and illustrates “how the quest for a perfect society led instead to the worst––in the course of revolting against which the true ends of life are established.” It is more than suspicion: the year 2021 is 1984. What many understand by instinct, Lowenthal here articulates in clear terms using the political prophesy of this no longer futuristic literature. To be one without truthful unity? This is the picture of human brotherhood ushering in the only thing worse than inequality––enslavement. There is no positive political message in 1984, argues Lowenthal, but there is positive moral message that is nearly always overlooked by commentators. “Through the movement of the novel, Orwell tries to impress on the passions, hearts and minds of his readers the most valuable lessons concerning the right and wrong way to live. With the decline of Christianity’s influence in forming the moral sense of the West and the concomitant increase in power hunger, wielding instruments born of modern enlightenment, what mankind most needed was moral guidance, conveyed not abstractly, through philosophy, but in such a way as to grip the whole soul.” But can Orwell be trusted as a guide to the goodness in human nature? Lowenthal says he can be, and more. He gives us a sketch of the intellectual process that compels Orwell to ultimately outgrow Marxism, his detection and rejection of totalitarian regimes (above all in Communism), and in what way the principles of liberalism of his day were given warning labels by a writer who was not a formally educated political philosopher. Laced with relativism, any current of thought that does not acknowledge the proper ends of man will be effaced by the next master of the masses. Lowenthal echoes Orwell when he says, “we have abandoned inculcating good citizenship, higher ideals and a sense of personal worth in the schools, encouraging instead an aimless low-level conformist ‘individuality’ just waiting to be harnessed together and directed. Given these conditions, can we be sure we have left the conditions to the horrors of 1984 far behind as mere fiction?” Orwell and Lowenthal are unlikely co-collaborators, unless one perceives how much alike in their exhortations to fellow man they are. The steady tenor of their hard warning is made possible by a hope-soaked confidence that, in utter sobriety, is repulsed by anything that threatens human freedom and dignity. This book is required reading for anyone who believes in the return of socialism. Indeed, any recent university graduate should be debriefed by Lowenthal before entering the real world.

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In the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flurry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato's Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato's way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato's principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any contemporary translation. Much of what the dialogue offers to today's reader - namely, its invitation to see erotic experience as the privileged locus of our contact with the sacred and the divine - is lost in translation by failures of tone more than by inaccuracies or simple infelicities. The elevation and sophistication of Shelley's prose makes his translation a much better English vehicle for Plato's writing than the rather chatty and colloquial translations current today. Plato's speeches on love need an English idiom in which myth is at home, and in which humour rises to urbanity rather than descending to mere wit and joke. With Shelley, we get a translation of a great literary masterpiece by a writer who is himself a literary master, and his mastery is of exactly the type required by Plato's text. This translation came at the height of Shelley's powers, mirroring in language and conception some of his finest works, and so is itself a precious document in the history of Romanticism, for which the re-appropriation of Plato is second in importance only to the massive influence of Shakespeare. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband's literary executor, upon publication of (a somewhat expurgated version of) the dialogue, boasted that "Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special and the tangible. This did not result from imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study. He then translated his Symposium and Ion; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley." If this goes too far, it goes at least in the right direction. David K. O'Connor, in his introduction and footnotes, provides the historical and philosophic framework to appreciate best the importance of the dialogue and translation.

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Socrates and the Gods is the first book-length treatment of the Apology and its two supporting dialogues: the Euthyphro and Crito. These works are closely read and analyzed in a way that both takes into account their historic-cultural context (Homer, Greek tragedy, and the Peloponnesian War) and recognizes how Socrates refuses to be determined by material or mimetic necessity. The carefully argued interpretations arrived at are not distorted or skewed by a priori assumptions held by most political or analytic philosophers; it is not assumed that Socrates is either a cynical atheist who despised and deceived the rabble or an unsophisticated crank with little to offer a post-humanist Philosopher of Mind. Socrates’ distinctive take on the gods is essential to understanding the meaning of Socrates’ life, death, and self-proclaimed divine mission. The Euthyphro shows how Socrates overturns Homeric religion in a way that subtly but definitively establishes the philosophical basis of Christian Revelation. Determined to allow the Apology of Socrates to speak for itself, Plato uses the persona of Euthyphro, who almost certainly did not exist, to represent Meletus and the problem of religious literalism in a godless age. Socrates’ reinterpretation of Homer is shown to overcome the pervasive Oedipal antagonisms of the Iliad and bequeath posterity a healthier view of the respective roles played by divine and human elements in the Cosmos. Only the Euthyphro prepares the reader to approach Plato’s Apology with an adequate understanding of the issues, philosophical and politico-theological, at stake. Decisively refuting the currently fashionable dogma of Socrates’ atheism, Socrates’ mission consists in confounding false or reified claims to divine knowledge that are used to deny the ability of the human person to practice virtue. Socrates simultaneously affirms revelation and denies the capacity of prophets to serve as exegetes of their own winged utterances. The Apology will be shown to recover the better part of Homer’s legacy: the resilient soul of Odysseus, Socrates’ preferred alter ego, and to firmly establish the soul’s essential capacities to practice moral virtue and engage in exegetical interaction with inspired texts. The Crito is a dramatic treatment of the problem of Socrates’ intellectual and spiritual legacy. Socrates is anxious to show Crito that the pursuit of philosophy does not end with his death but rather must be seen as a capacity present in every human soul. Socrates’ existential proof to Crito, his last human judge, of the soul’s power to judge and be ruled by criteria of good and evil rather than pleasure and pain or honor and shame – must be seen to co-exist with his firm belief that the gods will not allow a good man to be harmed, as opposed to be killed, by those worse than he. Subtly echoing Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the Crito founds a tradition of mutually entwined revelation and interpretation that is recognizable and retrievable in our day. Recovery of our Socratic origins is crucial to the West’s survival.

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In The Second Spring, the widely published author Joseph Bottum pens what may be the most original cultural undertaking in decades – an attempt to heal the damaged poetry of our time with an infusion of music, and an effort to strengthen the weak music of our age with an injection of poetry. Ten years ago, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, Bottum published an essay called “The Soundtracking of America,” a much-attacked account of the misuse of music in contemporary culture. Now, with The Second Spring, he comes at the problem from the other side, as a lyricist rather than a critic. Selecting twenty-four haunting melodies, from a 13th-century Galician-Portuguese cantiga to a modern country/western tune, Bottum composes new verses that both stand alone as poems and reach deep into the roots of the musical genres in which they stand. Hymns, lullabies, folk tunes, pop songs, dirges, shape-note spirituals, broadsides, and Renaissance Italian dances – The Second Spring explores all these without sarcasm or mockery, allowing each genre to express itself within its natural form. The Second Spring contains the lyrics, melodies, and new piano arrangements (with guitar chords) for twenty-four songs: new words to old music. With an introduction and, as an appendix, the text of “The Soundtracking of America,” this book is a vital and significant event in the nation’s artistic culture.

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During the last months of the war, Josef Pieper saw the realization of a long-cherished plan to escape from the “lethal chaos” that was the Germany of that time, “plucked,” he writes, “as was Habakkuk, by the hair of his head . . . to be planted into a realm of the most peaceful seclusion, whose borders and exists were, of course, controlled by armed sentries.” There he made contact with a friend close-by, who possessed an amazing library, and Pieper hit upon the idea of reading the letters of Goethe from that library. Soon, however, he decided to read the entire Weimar edition of fifty volumes, which were brought to him in sequence, two or three at a time.The richness of this life revealing itself over a period of more than sixty years appeared before my gaze in its truly overpowering magnificence, which almost shattered my powers of comprehension – confined, as they had been, to the most immediate and pressing concerns. What a passionate focus on reality in all its forms, what an undying quest to chase down all that is in the world, what strength to affirm life, what ability to take part in it, what vehemence in the way he showed his dedication to it! Of course, too, what ability to limit himself to what was appropriate; what firm control in inhibiting what was purely aimless; what religious respect for the truth of being! I could not overcome my astonishment; and the prisoner entered a world without borders, a world in which the fact of being in prison was of absolutely no significance. But no matter how many astonishing things I saw in these unforgettable weeks of undisturbed inner focus, nothing was more surprising or unexpected than this: to realize how much of what was peculiar to this life occurred in carefully preserved seclusion; how much the seemingly communicative man who carried on a world-wide correspondence still never wanted to expose in words the core of his existence. It was precisely in the seclusion, the limitation, the silence of Goethe that made the strongest impact on Pieper. Here was modern Germany’s quintessential conversationalist intellectual, but the strength of his words came from the restraint behind them, even to the point of purposeful forgetting:The culmination is when the eighty-year-old sees forgetting not as a convulsive refusal to think of things, but as what could almost be termed a physiological process of simple forgetting as a function of life. He praises as “a great gift of the gods” . . . “the ethereal stream of forgetfulness” which he “was always able to value, to use, and to heighten.” However manifold the forms of this silence and of their unconscious roots and conscious motives may have been, is it not always the possibility of hearing, the possibility of a purer perception of reality that is aimed at? And so, is not Goethe’s type of silence above all the silence of one who listens? . . . This listening silence is much deeper than the mere refraining from words and speech in human intercourse. It means a stillness, which, like a breath, has penetrated into the inmost chamber of one’s own soul. It is meant, in the Goethean “maxim,” to “deny myself as much as possible and to take up the object into myself as purely as it is possible to do.” . . . The meaning of being silent is hearing – a hearing in which the simplicity of the receptive gaze at things is like the naturalness, simplicity, and purity of one receiving a confidence, the reality of which is creatura, God’s creation. And insofar as Goethe’s silence is in this sense a hearing silence, to that extent it has the status of the model and paradigm – however much, in individual instances, reservations and criticism are justified. One could remain circumspectly silent about this exemplariness after the heroic nihilism of our age has proclaimed the attitude of the knower to be by no means that of a silent listener but rather as that of self-affirmation over against being: insight and knowledge are naked defiance, the severest endangering of existence in the midst of the superior strength of concrete being. The resistance of knowledge opposes the oppressive superior power. However, that the knower is not a defiant rebel against concrete being, but above all else a listener who stays silent and, on the basis of his silence, a hearer – it is here that Goethe represents what, since Pythagoras, may be considered the silence tradition of the West.Pieper concludes his remarkable find with this summation:When such talk, which one encounters absolutely everywhere in workshops and in the marketplace – and as a constant temptation – , when such deafening talk, literally out to thwart listening, is linked to hopelessness, we have to ask is there not in silence – listening silence – necessarily a shred of hope? For who could listen in silence to the language of things if he did not expect something to come of such awareness of the truth? And, in a newly founded discipline of silence, is there not a chance not merely to overcome the sterility of everyday talk but also to overcome its brother, hopelessness – possibly if only to the extent that we know the true face of this relationship? I know that here quite different forces come into play which are beyond human control, and perhaps the circulus has to be broken through in a different place. However, one may ask: could not the “quick, strict resolution” to remain silent at the same time serve as a kind of training in hope?

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The conservative movement in America seems to have fallen on hard times. Even though conservative talk radio is at its height, and President Obama had to shift to the political center to win the 2008 election (only to disappoint months after his inauguration), conservative ideas garner little excitement or serious engagement among young people as they once did even just two decades ago. We have gone from Eric Voegelin “Don’t immanentize the eschaton” to Hannity’s “Sean, you’re a great American.” To be sure, many conservative and liberal young people have firm opinions on issues along the conservative-liberal fault line. They can opine, and fiercely so, by blog, twitter, or email on issues as wide ranging as same-sex marriage, Constitutional interpretation, abortion, free markets, and the role of religion in the public square. But very few, if any, of them seem to be aware of the intellectual patrimony from which their views sprang, and the arguments and reasons that animated the proponents of the ideas they claim to sincerely and deeply hold. “Hope” and “change,” though fine words in their own right, do not qualify as actual ideas that may guide presidents and prime ministers to excellence in statecraft. There was a time when many students in college or graduate school would participate in robust discussions with friend and foe alike about the ideas and arguments plumbed from the works authored by conservative luminaries as diverse as Hayek, Strauss, Voegelin, Buckley, Weaver, Friedman, Kirk, Lewis, Chesterton, and Anscombe, to name just a few. Sadly, there is very little of this going on today in our universities and colleges. A Second Look at First Things: A Case for Conservative Politics has two purposes. The first is to remedy this contemporary deficit by offering, in one volume, an intelligent, winsome, and readable articulation of conservative ideas on a variety of issues and questions. They range from the abstract (“Why the Natural Law Suggests a Divine Source”) to the practical (“Lincoln and the Art of Political Leadership”), and to the provocative (“Being Personal These Days: Designer Babies and the Future of Liberal Democracy”). The second purpose is to honor the great conservative political philosopher, Hadley P. Arkes, the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. In 2010 he celebrated his 70th birthday, and 2011 marked the 25th anniversary of his classic monograph on natural law and public policy, First Things: An -Inquiry Into the First Principles of Morals and Justice (Princeton University Press, 1986). So, in celebration of these milestones, the editors have chosen to produce a work that is consistent with Hadley’s vocation as an exceptional teacher of young people. Although most of those who have read Hadley’s books and articles think of him as an engaging and productive scholar, which indeed he is, his students – including both those at Amherst as well as those who have had the privilege to hear his spell-binding lectures elsewhere – know him as an outstanding teacher. His ability to unpack a principle of jurisprudence by weaving together an analytical argument with an enthralling tale or insightful anecdote is truly magical to behold. Contributors include Michael Novak, Daniel Robinson, Gerard Bradley, Allen Guelzo, Peter Augustine Lawler, Larry Arnn, James Schall, s.j., and Christopher Tollefesen.

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Plato’s Bedroom is a book for people who want to be better at falling in love and being in love, with all the ecstasies and dangers erotic life can bring. It is also an inviting book for readers who are intellectually playful and up for a challenge, written with verve, and full of stories thoughtful persons will find to be mirrors of their own erotic selves. Drawing on Greek myth, Plato, Shakespeare, and a wide range of modern literature and movies, the book gets Aphrodite talking with the young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and lets us listen in on Woody Allen arguing with Othello. The author’s account of how we seek, fear, avoid, and sometimes destroy love, is astonishingly fresh and engaging. Throughout its pages, one hears the voice of an engaging teacher and the conversation of a wise friend. In short, this is a work of practical philosophy, not scholarship, though only a scholar could have written it. It invites readers into a deep appreciation of timeless ancient wisdom through reflecting on their own powers for love and their susceptibility to desire. A distinctive feature of the book is the interweaving of two guiding threads in Plato’s conception of erotic experience: androgyny, that is, the integration of masculine and feminine; and creativity, in both a sexual and a spiritual sense. These two aspects of Plato’s erotic vision, androgyny and creativity, lead readers to a sense of grateful wonder and sacred awe at our own erotic powers. Our natural experience of romantic love, articulated so well by Plato, points toward a more explicitly religious interpretation of love’s commitments and pleasures. The author brings out some surprising and delightful connections between Plato’s pagan eroticism and the Adam and Eve story, Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels, and Catholic views about marriage.Plato’s Bedroom will be the first book to tap into the perennial curiosity about love and sex through the enduring interest of the general reader in philosophical reflection on contemporary culture.

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Volume 2 of Josef Pieper’s three-part autobiography is here presented for the first time in English translation. The volume represents not just a simple continuation of a seamless story. The first volume dealt with Pieper’s life from his birth in 1904 to the time of World War 2. The current volume deals with the post-war years, 1945–1964, offering a personal documentation of the institutional rubble through which an emerging academic and philosopher had to find his way. This included finding work, re-establishing himself in the family home, completing his academic education, and beginning to teach philosophy in a climate of despair and disillusionment. In this context, the quintessential Pieper emerges. His positive philosophy of being, firmly based on Plato and Thomas Aquinas, finds extraordinary resonance with students, who flock to his lectures in surprising numbers — seeking and finding a positive way forward. His dedication to training teachers sees him declining higher academic posts in Germany in favor of work which, though less lucrative and more obscure, he considered more fruitful. These years are also marked by his fiercely independent stance over against the Catholic hierarchy — despite his staunch adherence to the tradition values of Christianity. His popularity as a philosopher and teacher quickly spread to America, where he was invited to teach at famous universities. His fame led to further travels — to Switzerland, England, France, Spain, India, China, Saigon, and Thailand. Such travels enriched his thinking and nourished the open-mindedness of the Western philosopher.

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In John Foy's Night Vision, wars go on in the Middle East, violence is never far away, and the creatures of the field are “much the worse / for having been beneath the rotor blades.” Written in an uncluttered idiom, these poems, technically adept, play across a range of forms in a voice that stands out for its bitter clarity and directness. They are by turns contemplative and savage, invoking Meister Eckhart but acknowledging that “we die like dogs in the deep snow.” If they offer solace at all, it’s in a plainspoken, dark humor. The result is an emotional immediacy unique in American poetry.

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The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcel’s discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary, e.g.:* Our crisis is a metaphysical, not merely social, one.* What a man is depends partly on what he thinks he is, and a materialistic philosophy turns men into things.* Can a man be free except in a free country?* Stoicism is no longer a workable philosophy because today pressure can be put on the mind as well as on the body.* Technical progress is not evil in itself, but a technique is a means that, regarded as an end, can become either an idol or an excuse for self-idolatry. State control of scientific research, leading to a concentration on new means of destruction, is a calamity.* Fanaticism is an opinion that refuses to argue, and so the fanatic is an enemy of truth.* The kind of unification that science is bringing about today is really an ironing out of differences, but the only valuable kind of unity is one that implies a respect for differences.* We must beware of thinking in terms of great numbers and so blinding ourselves to the reality of individual suffering. Our philosophical approach to being is made possible only by our practical approach to our neighbor.* We must encourage the spirit of fraternity and distrust the kind of egalitarianism that is based on envy and resentment.* No man however humble should feel that he cannot spread the light among his friends. No easy solution is offered, but the author conveys his own faith that ultimately love and intelligence will triumph.

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This work explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Scientism is a deformation of science, which unnecessarily restricts the scope of scientific inquiry by placing a dogmatic faith in the method of the natural sciences. Its adherents call for nothing less than a complete transformation of society. Science becomes the idol that can magically cure the perpetual maladies of modern society and of human nature itself. Whitney demonstrates that scientism is intellectually impoverishing and politically dangerous. Whitney surveys the development of scientism from early modernity to the present day, beginning with Francis Bacon, arguing that Bacon stands as the founder, not only of the experimental method, but also of scientism. This is most evident in his presentation of a scientific utopia in New Atlantis. After briefly noting the impact of Isaac Newton and the French Encylopedists, Whitney then moves on to the other great representative figure of scientism: Auguste Comte, who demonstrates the religious fervor that accompanies the scientistic attitude. Continuing on the path set forth by Bacon, Comte argues for a reorganization of society based on the precepts of positive science. The eugenics movements in 20th-century America and Germany is next, and the author argues that they reflect the new worldview that had emerged from Darwin’s evolutionary theory; a theory partially based on scientistic principles. The solution to scientism, Whitney advances, lies in a new (or revised) science of politics; the foundation of which is based on the Classical sources that were either discredited or banned outright by the proposals of Bacon and Comte. He concludes the work with contemporary examples of scientism, including the climate change debates, genetic engineering, and the New Atheism movement. “Chief among the spiritually blighting tendencies of the age is materialist reductionism parading as scientific orthodoxy. David Whitney powerfully explores this movement and habit of mind as it takes its rise in the form of scientism, especially from Sir Francis Bacon’s NEW ATLANTIS in the 17th century and finds full fruition in the positivist teachings of August Comte in the 19th century—a preamble to the behavioralist dogmas of our own time. The openness to the facts of experience characteristic of all science as a search for the truth of reality in all its dimensions and diversity is thereby effectively abandoned in favor of an unrelenting insistence on a restrictive methodology ostensibly grounded in phenomenal reality that is perversely made the touchstone of all valid inquiry. The consequences are philosophically as well as politically disastrous, as Whitney brilliantly demonstrates in this path-breaking study.” – Ellis Sandoz, Founder of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies "David Whitney’s excellent critique of what he calls scientism, a dogmatic application of the methods of natural science to social science, provides a high-brow diagnosis of the modern maladies that result from the “rhetorical power of science.” –– Scott Robinson, voegelinview

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Metafisica della Conoscenza e Politica in S. Tommaso d’Aquino was originally published in Bologna in 1985 by the Centro Studi Europa Orientale. This English translation has been prepared with the explicit permission and encouragement of Buttiglione. The work grew from a series of lectures Buttiglione gave on the relationship between metaphysics, knowledge, and politics based on a critical reading of Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics and other relevant texts. His aim was to advance Thomistic thinking by incorporating the insights of modern philosophy on subjectivity and relationality. In addition to its primary audience of philosophers, theologians, and political theorists, the book surprisingly enjoyed a wide general readership in Italy at the time of its publication. It represented an exciting attempt to harmonize medieval philosophy and the insights of personalism that had already had a deep impact on European intellectual life. Buttiglione was able to describe this attempt in a way accessible to a general readership, and in a way that confronted the political challenges Italy had been confronting for the last forty years. Now, thirty-five years after the book’s initial publication, the conclusions Buttiglione draws from reading Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Politics––and the connections he makes between philosophy, theology, and political theory––are more relevant than ever. He argues that the traditional definition of “person” as rationalis naturae individua substantia––an individual substance or substrate (hypokeimenon) of a rational nature––“lacks that certain element that makes Augustine’s approach to personhood so appealing.” Hence Aquinas’s definition “is left wanting since it fails to elaborate on the crucial aspect of interpersonal relationship.” The ingenuous way in which Buttiglione enlivens Thomistic political thinking with personalist philosophy helps to explain not only why free societies are more stable, tolerant, and respectful of human rights than totalitarian states, but theocratic ones as well. Only by raising the interpersonal aspects of political society to an ontological level—indeed, only by affirming and esteeming the self-transcendence of the human person as evidenced through ontological analysis—do the personal relationships that root and enliven the human person also lead to a realistic, dynamic, and convincing vision of the person’s real existence. Buttiglione was startlingly prescient of the problems we confront at the beginning of the third millennium. This book will spark new discussions as it explains the importance of both the medieval tradition and twentieth-century personalism. The book also draws on a wide range of secondary sources unavailable to English readers that I and will have the unique ability to introduce readers to the “Italian” way of relating speculative and political philosophy in a relatively slim volume.

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The essays in this volume honor the work of political scientist and Eric Voegelin scholar, Barry Cooper, by considering how political philosophy (a form of hunting) and empiricism get “woven” together (to borrow a metaphor from Plato). In other words, they consider how science needs to be conducted if it is to remain true to our commonsense experience of the world and to facilitate political judgment. Several of the essays cover Eric Voegelin, including his understanding of consciousness, a comparison of him and Leo Strauss, and his self-understanding as a scholar. Other essays consider terrorism, technology, religion and the modern world, the divided line in Plato’s Republic, and the political significance of hope. The volume also includes a number of essays that consider different aspects of Canadian politics, including its strong regionalism, political culture, public law, and the infamous “Calgary School” of political science. These essays are united by the concern that political science must “weave” together political philosophy and empiricism. This task was what Aristotle meant when he characterized political science as a matter of practical wisdom. It is an insight that was also central for Voegelin’s restoration of political science in the twentieth century, and that these essays continue into the twenty-first century. Political analysis begins in whatever contemporary crisis the analyst has found himself. The analyst sifts through competing claims of political meaning asserted by the partisans in the crisis. From there he ascends to greater luminosity concerning the human condition by viewing those claims in light of the “major questions in the history of political thought.” They inform one another, as the search for order is necessarily the search for order that is conducted by a particular individual’s consciousness in the context of a particular community in space and time. This volume will be of special interest to scholars of political philosophy as well as citizens and statesmen interested in how an engagement in the history of political philosophy can facilitate political judgment in particular political circumstances.

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Poetry is exciting, but elusive to most. This is troublesome for Christians because the Bible, John Poch reminds us, is largely composed of poetical verse. In God’s Poems, Poch re-introduces sacred text as purposefully poetic, and explains what that means and invites the reader to with this insight live more thoughtfully and beautifully. But that is not all. Poch as a well-established and regarded poet, turns his eye to contemporary poetry and vindicates its function in a “created and creative world.” Today many have abandoned the genre as a wasteland of misguided voice that really has nothing to say. The poet is a truth-teller, and Poch as devoted writer, teacher, and believer sends out a renewed call to turn to verse as a means of seeing oneself as God’s poeima, or poem (Letter to Ephesians). The depth of self-knowing relates directly to an aptitude to engage the category of poetry at some level. A tragic void is filled with Poch’s effort to exhort the reader to patiently reconnect with poetry even though it has been hijacked by persons who want to be heard more than speak well. (This book is essential, therefore, for aspiring poets.) For faithful readers or those seeking to return, Poch is a place to begin to understand contemporary writers worth knowing and which poets of the past must remain with us. In Virgilian fashion, he can see the panorama behind him and that which lies immediately ahead and instills a recovered love of an eternal medium that will be restored to a state of coherency and enlightened perspective. If Poch has faith in poetry it is because poetry is indeed a source of faith. If Justin Martyr claimed that everything that is true belongs to Christians, Poch shows us that everyone who speaks truth is to some degree a poet. Even God with his revealed wisdom chooses poetry as medium par excellence. It is essential to know how poetry works. “Great poems that we consider literature give us what we never expected. They go beyond the usefulness of conveying a feeling and unveiling beauty; and they tell us who we are.”

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"This book almost didn't exist. I was about to write a serious, heavy book entitled How To Save Western Civilization, as a sequel to my book How To Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss. But writing it was not making me happy, and reading it was not going to make anybody else happy either. And then I stopped just long enough for my guardian angel to squeeze through that tiny window of opportunity that I had opened up by my silence and to whisper this commonsense question into my subconscious: "Why not make them happy instead?" (Angels specialize in common sense.) I started thinking: Western civilization is neither healthy, happy, nor holy. Humor is all three. Humor is not only holy, it's Heavenly. And if you are surprised to be told that humor is Heavenly, you need to read this book because you reveal your misunderstanding of both humor and Heaven. If you ask, 'Is there laughter in Heaven?' my answer is: 'You can't be serious!'"

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John Poch’s fourth collection of poems, Fix Quiet, is an ambitious exploration in verse of failure, death, and a redemptive beauty found in the surprise of order. From the opening poem, “Shrike,” which is itself a meditation on poetry as paradoxically both predator and prey, to the final love poem, a crown of sonnets, these poems unite the form and function of line, rhyme, syntax, rhetorical wit, and larger architectures, to capture moments in time and name them. Poems that move from the rivers of northern New Mexico to travel across Italy are concerned with how the limitations of time and place wound and disappoint but also how they expand our vision and take us deeper into experience. A river can’t be apprehended easily, but here by faith the poet takes the measure of the headwaters to the sea, of our greatest moving mysteries of love and death.

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The need and desire for the integral development of the person in his or her somatic, psychological and spiritual dimensions is growing faster than it can be answered. Ancient and classical wisdom gives us much to ponder and apply, but there is still much more to be given human life in the joy and integrity offered by Christianity. When one speaks of the meaningfulness and fruitfulness of life, there is an apostolic quality that makes of the beauty of a single individual a cause of fruitfulness in others as well. Yet many who are entrusted with the formation and care of souls have little at their disposal to foster or explain this. The present book aims to respond to this need by addressing the consonance and individuality in human nature, and the ways in which ordering in personality and psychology are not inhibiting, but potentially liberating and influential. Francisco Insa draws from his medical and theological background, which includes both clinical and pastoral experience, to address all those responsible for the formation of others––including parents, teachers, priests, spiritual directors––and enables them to confront their roles as formators with greater insight and confidence. Insa's guidance through the human personality and its various expressions, the education of the character, growth in maturity, the particularity of each stage of the life cycle, sexuality and celibacy, chastity in the context of post-modern life, and mental illnesses is a landmark presentation of scientific rigor matched with practical application. As often as one says, "My situation is unique,"; the author here responds: "Yes, but special even more than you can express"; Insa is forthright about what can never be lost in human beings, but only recovered when the head and heart are aligned and formed properly. For as much as this book may help the reader understand himself, it will also render him better understood by others. The Christian approach to the formation of affectivity, as Insa shows, is indispensable to deep and enduring human development, and it is often the only way to identify and mediate interior dissonance and confusion.

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In the fourth title in the Dissident American Thought Today Series, Chilton Williamson takes on liberalism and reveals the 'faith' of the present Democratic Party as its own cultivated version of absurdity. This 'advanced liberalism' is not the liberalism of Mill, and it certainly no longer is the thinking man's party. If it were once true that conservatism is unimaginative and reactionary, the contrary is the picture of our times. Liberalism now asserts that human nature can and must be perfected, but without reference to nature. The age of the expert has been thrust upon the United States with the urgency of technique to be applied to coerce the vision of a perfect society and perfect human beings. Williamson observes that this liberalism to nevertheless be collapsing, given the obvious opposition to the idea that it is essential to modernity. Liberalism is ironically a kind of unyielding control, "a relativist persuasion that discourages and resists fixed beliefs and certainties and the idea of truth itself." Williamson offers commentary on the present state of liberal ideas and their crimes against better judgment, and vindicates conservatism from being labeled reactionary. Liberalism is exposed as a faith we cannot accept, for it contains nothing to be believed and what it says about the order of things is pure fiction.

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Juxtaposing “ecumenism” and “jihad,” two words that many would consider strange and at odds with one another, Peter Kreeft argues that we need to change our current categories and alignments. We need to realize that we are at war and that the sides have changed radically. Documenting the spiritual and moral decay that has taken hold of modern society, Kreeft issues a wake-up call to all God-fearing Christians, Jews, and Muslims to unite together in a “religious war” against the common enemy of godless secular humanism, materialism, and immorality. Aware of the deep theological differences of these monotheistic faiths, Kreeft calls for a moratorium on our polemics against one another so that we can form an alliance to fight together to save Western civilization.

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Richard Ferrier expounds on the basic truth learned from Alan Keyes during work on his political campaign in 1996. "He taught us to see what President Lincoln saw 160 years ago: an American should always take his principles and form his sentiments from those expressed in the Declaration of Independence." Whereas it might seem America is the product of political divorce, the Declaration instead endows our nation with the qualities of a marriage. We are a deliberate union, Ferrier says, and we must strive to live well politically by doing right by the pledge contained in the Declaration. Here Ferrier transforms decades of teaching American history and its founding into a reflection on its most important document. Our troubled times call for a return to America's fundamental principles. This book shows their sources, their truth, and their lasting power. It is a labor of love, and of hope. Anyone seeking opportunity in the United States should read this book and be reminded of the privilege and obligation of the American way of life, all contained in the Declaration of Independence.

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There have been serious complaints since Vatican II that many Catholics do not know the basic teaching of the Church on the essentials of the faith, such as the Ten Command-ments, the Seven Sacraments, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the twelve articles of the Creed. That was one of the main reasons for the production of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was mandated by Blessed John Paul II and published in the 1990s. After Vatican II there was much emphasis on preaching that explains the daily readings from the Bible. That is what we now call a “homily.” Traditionally a sermon has been preaching on some point of doctrine or morals, illustrated and supported by quotes from the Bible. An unintended and unanticipated result of the homily has been the neglect of sermons and a lack of preaching on the fundamentals of the Catholic faith. When the Catechism appeared, some bishops, like Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York, gave sermons based on it for over a year. The 54 doctrinal sermons in this book are presented in the hope that priests will make use of them to prepare real sermons that explain the basic truths of the Catholic faith. The sermons follow the basic outline of the Catechism: Creed, Sacraments, Commandments, and the Our Father. The purpose of these sermons is to promote a better understanding in the minds of the faithful of the beauty and depth of truth contained in our holy Catholic faith. The grasp of that truth should result in an increase of faith, hope and charity.

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