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

This is a corrected second impression of the original bilingual critical edition of Poinsot’s work on signs completed in 1632. New materials include a new “Foreword” by the translator and a full table of correlations between the independent Tractatus edition and the original Cursus Philo-sophicus from which that edition was established. The Cursus Philosophicus was one of the two great syntheses of Latin thought made in the lifetime of Descartes. Yet only that of Francis Suarez in 1597, the Disputationes Metaphysicae, was destined to be read by the early moderns. This is a work of immense erudition that synthesizes the matter of signs philosophy from Aristotle and his successors in Greece and Rome to the pre-eminent St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and so on through the leading schools of Renaissance thought. Poinsot was instrumental in the twentieth-century revival of Thomism led by Jacques Maritain. His seminal Introduction to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (St. Augustine’s Press, 2004)

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Consonant with its commitment to publish seminal works in the field of canon law, St. Augustine's Press is pleased to make available the first volume in a series that will undoubtedly endure as a masterpiece of scholarship. Carlos José Errázuriz, Professor of Canon Law at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Rome) has provided a comprehensive and insightful treatment of rights, justice, and law in the Catholic Church, beginning with the most basic questions regarding the essence of these realities. His responses exhibit the perspective of that which is just in the Church, which consists of ecclesial juridical goods: the Word of God, the sacraments, the freedom of the children of God, and sacred potestas. This work vindicates the institution of law, but also addresses the "spontaneity" of just freedom proper to what has been instituted by Christ. Errázuriz presents more than the current Code of Canon Law. He instills a realistic perspective of right and law in the Church, and in so doing fills a massive gap in English scholarship. No introduction to canon law available in English rivals Errázuriz's description of justice in the Church and its relationship with communion and sacramentality. Volume I is comprised of the first three chapters of the original, Corso fondamentale sul diritto nella Chiesa (in two volumes, Giuffrè: Milan, 2009 and 2017): "Rights, Justice and Law in the Church," "Canon Law in History," and "The Configuration of Rights and Law in the Church."

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This volume is a tribute to the thought of Seth Benardete by contributors who had the rare good fortune of studying with him or those who discovered the treasure of his writings. Benardete’s classical scholarship and remarkable knowledge of Greek served his philosophic quest to understand the nature of things, which he pursued through a brilliant practice of interpretation of texts. He found in the Platonic dialogue—in the action through which the argument unfolds—the key to philosophic thinking, and this enabled him, in turn, to read the poets philosophically. He was fully immersed in the world of the ancients, starting with Homer, but their works opened up for him a way to the fundamental questions—about justice and love, nature and law, the city and the gods. Seeing, as he once put it, that “the problem of the human good is grounded in the city, and the problem of being in god,” he came to the conclusion that “Political philosophy is the eccentric core of philosophy.” Benardete wrote this statement reflecting on the political-theological issue in the work of his teacher, Leo Strauss; but the paradoxical notion of an “eccentric core,” which gives this volume its title, expresses the characteristic way his own thinking so often moves from an off-center observation to disclose, unexpectedly, the unifying focal point of a whole. This collection had its origin in a small conference organized by Patrick Goodin in the spring of 2005 at Howard University. It expanded to include papers from an earlier memorial conference for Benardete at the New School for Social Research in December 2002 and a reflection just after his death, in November 2001, as well as reviews of his books published over the years. The essays about or inspired by Benardete’s thought—on the Bible and Homer, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle and the Roman writers—suggest the remarkable range of his teaching and studies. The centrality of Plato is evident not only in these essays but also in the reviews, by readers who appreciate the importance of Benardete’s work, its subtlety and its depth. The volume closes with three of Benardete’s previously unpublished essays and a bibliography of his writings. Harvey Mansfield, Ronna Burger, Laurence Lampert, John Blanchard, Olivia Delgado de Torres, Heinrich Meier, Michael Davis, Robert Berman, Patrick Goodin, Richard Velkley, Holly Haynes, Steven Berg, Bryan Warnick, Stanley Rosen, Will Morrisey, Arlene Saxonhouse, Abraham Anderson, Martin Sitte, Steven Berg, Edward Rothstein, Mark Blitz, Vincent Renzi, Svetozar, and including Seth Benardete. Patrick Goodin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University, where he has taught since 1996. He received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in 1996 after writing his dissertation, under Benardete’s supervision, on Aristotle’s de Anima. His research and teaching interests include Ancient Greek Philosophy, Africana, Afro-Caribbean and African American Philosophy. Ronna Burger is Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. After completing her dissertation on Plato’s Phaedrus, directed by Benardete, she went on to write The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (Yale 1985, St. Augustine’s Press, revised edition 2016). She is the author of Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago 2008) as well as co-editor with Michael Davis of two collections of Seth Benardete’s writings, The Argument of the Action (Chicago 2000) and The Archaeology of the Soul (St. Augustine’s Press 2012).

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Aristotle's much-translated On Poetics is the earliest and arguably the best treatment that we possess of tragedy as a literary form. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis have translated it anew with a view to rendering Aristotle’s text into English as precisely as possible. A literal translation has long been needed, for in order to excavate the argument of On Poetics one has to attend not simply to what is said on the surface but also to the various puzzles, questions, and peculiarities that emerge only on the level of how Aristotle says what he says and thereby leads one to revise and deepen one’s initial understanding of the intent of the argument. As On Poetics is about how tragedy ought to be composed, it should not be surprising that it turns out to be a rather artful piece of literature in its own right.Benardete and Davis supplement their edition of On Poetics with extensive notes and appendices. They explain nuances of the original that elude translation, and they provide translations of passages found elsewhere in Aristotle’s works as well as in those of other ancient authors that prove useful in thinking through the argument of On Poetics both in terms of its treatment of tragedy and in terms of its broader concerns. By following the connections Aristotle plots between On Poetics and his other works, readers will be in a position to appreciate the centrality of this little book for his thought on the whole.In an introduction that sketches the overall interpretation of On Poetics presented in his The Poetry of Philosophy (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), Davis argues that, while On Poetics is certainly about tragedy, it has a further concern extending beyond poetry to the very structure of the human soul in its relation to what is, and that Aristotle reveals in the form of his argument the true character of human action.

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Over the past few decades an increasing number of Christians have sought to celebrate the Last Supper, which was a Passover seder, as a way of better understanding Easter. Several Passover haggadahs aimed at Christians are presently on the market. But all have sought to celebrate the Passover outside of the context of the Old Testament itself. The seders resulting from using these haggadahs are rewrites of the authentic haggadahs and do not recapture either the usage that the Jewish people have experienced throughout the ages or the Last Supper that Jesus celebrated with his Disciples. Yet the authentic seder is greatly to be preferred, because it includes the historic context of the Last Supper and, consequently, the real base for understanding Easter. In A Passover Haggadah for Christians, Bruce Fingerhut, president of St. Augustine’s Press, presents a haggadah for a Passover seder similar to the one that Jesus Himself celebrated. And it presents a commentary that shows the important divergences that Jesus presented in the Last Supper (e.g., washing the feet of the Disciples, leaving the room for Gethsemene after the third cup of wine, speaking of his betrayal in terms of the one who dips his bread with Him, and, of course, presenting Himself as the bread and wine of the celebration). By employing a complete and authentic seder service, A Passover Haggadah for Christians allows participants to discover for themselves the great preparation that the Last Supper, a Passover seder, was for Easter and to take in the beauty, inspiration, and “flavor” of Passover on their own terms, and not simply as an event on the way to a final position already foreseen, as a looking at the past with the eye of the future. But the service itself is so bountifully important and prescient for Christians, the little “aha moments” that one gets by being led by the hand become “AHA MOMENTS” when one is given the actual words Jesus spoke, has seen the significance of it in light of His own life, and participates in the service as a disciple. A Passover Haggadah for Christians comes complete with full explanations of the celebration itself and their meaning for Easter, Biblical references, facing Hebrew and, for the main prayers said by all, transliteration of the Hebrew, a glossary, and musical scores. In fact, a Jewish family could use A Passover Haggadah for Christians by ignoring the Christian explanation (which is in color) for the seder itself, but reading it at a later time. By doing so, they would understand a great deal about Christianity too. After all, our ignorance of one another goes both ways.

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The atheists Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell and Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion talk down to believers. Sam Harris in The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation insults believers outright. All three assume that believers are not very bright. Their approach is not productive of much understanding. In The Philosopher’s Enigma, Richard Watson explains to believers in temperate and readable prose why he and many others are not believers. His discussion is based on strict Augustinianism, the foundation of seriously argued Christianity. God is hidden – that is, the concept of God is unintelligible – as discussed at length by Leszek Kolakowski in his Religion If There Is No God (St. Augustine’s Press) – in the sense that there are no known rational arguments for God’s existence. Moreover, Augustine argues that finite human beings cannot understand God’s infinite perfections. Augustine concludes that God has omniscient knowledge of every human being’s behavior, which after all, is predetermined by God prior to His creation of the world. Most difficult to accept, as Calvin later stresses, is the inference that because humans do not determine their own behavior, God predetermines who is saved and who is damned with no reference to this behavior. A foundation of Christianity is that because of the Fall of Man, we are all sinners, and thus there is no reason why God should pick this person for salvation and that one for damnation. But most Christians believe that faith, God’s grace, Jesus’ sacrifice, being born again, and in particular, good works, can earn one salvation. But Augustine and later Calvin see no evidence for these views. Even if, or perhaps even because, God gives a sinner the grace to be good – a person’s good works do not assure salvation. After all, even before God created the world, God predetermined the behavior of every human being. Thus because humans cannot determine their own behavior, they cannot be saved or damned with reference to this behavior.A major difficulty in understanding and accepting the story of the Creation, then, is that even though God determines Adam’s behavior, God punishes Adam for disobedience by decreeing that all Adam’s progeny will be born sinners. Watson begins his book with the steel-trap objections made by his daughter, when she was seven years old, as he read the Bible to her. To the story of the Garden, she objected: “But God made Adam! God made Adam sin! God is not fair!” She slid off his lap, and he had to bribe her to return.In The Philosopher’s Enigma, Watson also discusses in detail the concepts of the soul, angels, ghosts, mind, and body. He argues that the classic Cartesian mind/body problem of how an immaterial mind or soul and a material body can interact will eventually be superseded by a concept of a human being according to which, even though a person’s body/mind is bound by physical laws, it still makes its own considered decisions, and to that extent a human being is free. And because the mind/body is one entity, there is no problem about two different things – a mind and a body-interacting.Watson concludes that this means there is no such thing as a disembodied mind or soul, and so no such things as angels and ghosts that could help or harm you. Basing this discussion in the context of contemporary neurophilosophy, his conclusions about the relationships of mind/soul follow those of Kolakowski in being reminiscent of Spinoza.

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Winston Churchill wrote five books before he was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five. The most impressive of these books, The River War tells the story of Britain’s arduous and risky campaign to reconquer the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century. More than half a century of subjection to Egypt had ended a decade earlier when Sudanese Dervishes rebelled against foreign rule and killed Britain’s envoy Charles Gordon at his palace in Khartoum in 1885. Political Islam collided with European imperialism. Herbert Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian army, advancing hundreds of miles south along the Nile through the Sahara Desert, defeated the Dervish army at the battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898. Churchill, an ambitious young cavalry officer serving with his regiment in India, had already published newspaper columns and a book about fighting on the Afghan frontier. He yearned to join Kitchener’s campaign. But the general, afraid of what he would write about it, refused to have him. Churchill returned to London. With help from his mother and the prime minister, he managed to get himself attached to an English cavalry regiment sent to strengthen Kitchener’s army. Hurriedly travelling to Egypt, Churchill rushed upriver to Khartoum, catching up with Kitchener’s army just in time to take part in the climactic battle. That day he charged with the 21st Lancers in the most dangerous fighting against the Dervish host. He wrote fifteen dispatches for the Morning Post in London. As Kitchener had expected, Churchill’s dispatches and his subsequent book were highly controversial. The precocious officer, having earlier seen war on two other continents, showed a cool independence of his commanding officer. He even resigned from the army to be free to write the book as he pleased. He gave Kitchener credit for his victory but found much to criticize in his character and campaign. Churchill’s book, far from being just a military history, told the whole story of the Egyptian conquest of the Sudan and the Dervishes’ rebellion against imperial rule. The young author was remarkably even-handed, showing sympathy for the founder of the rebellion, Muhammad Ahmed, and for his successor the Khalifa Abdullahi, whom Kitchener had defeated. He considered how the war in northeast Africa affected British politics at home, fit into the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and France, and abruptly thrust the vast Sudan, with the largest territory in Africa, into an uncertain future in Britain’s orbit. In November 1899, The River War was published in “two massive volumes, my magnum opus (up to date), upon which I had lavished a whole year of my life,” as Churchill recalled later in his autobiography. The book had twenty-six chapters, five appendices, dozens of illustrations, and colored maps. Three years later, in 1902, it was shortened to fit into one volume. Seven whole chapters, and parts of every other chapter, disappeared in the abridgment. Many maps and most illustrations were also dropped. Since then the abridged edition has been reprinted regularly, and eventually it was even abridged further. But the full two-volume book, which is rare and expensive, was never published again—until now. St. Augustine’s Press, in collaboration with the International Churchill Society, brings back to print in two handsome volumes The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan unabridged, for the first time since 1902. Every chapter and appendix from the first edition has been restored. All the maps are in it, in their original colors, with all the illustrations by Churchill’s brother officer Angus McNeill. More than thirty years in the making, under the editorship of James W. Muller, this new edition of The River War will be the definitive one for all time. The whole book is printed in two colors, in black and red type, to show what Churchill originally wrote and how it was abridged or altered later. For the first time, a new appendix reproduces Churchill’s Sudan dispatches as he wrote them, before they were edited by the Morning Post. Other new appendices reprint Churchill’s subsequent writings on the Sudan. Thousands of new footnotes have been added to the book by the editor, identifying Churchill’s references to people, places, writings, and events unfamiliar to readers today. Professor Muller’s new introduction explains how the book fits into Churchill’s career as a writer and an aspiring politician. He examines the statesman’s early thoughts about war, race, religion, and imperialism, which are still our political challenges in the twenty-first century. Half a century after The River War appeared, this book was one of a handful of his works singled out by the Swedish Academy when it awarded Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Now, once again, its reader can follow Churchill back to the war he fought on the Nile, beginning with the words of his youngest daughter. Before she died, Mary Soames wrote a new foreword, published here, which concludes that “In this splendid new edition…we have, in effect, the whole history of The River War as Winston Churchill wrote it—and it makes memorable reading.”

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Written in the 1890s, Leon Bloy's masterful novel has had an immeasurable effect on all European Catholic writing since. (Bloy was responsible for the conversion of Jacques and Räissa Maritain in 1905, and they referred to him as their godfather.) It is an extraordinary book, powerful in the manner of dos Passos, and yet spiritual in the manner of the Bible. It is the story of a woman who is abysmally poor, brutally treated and exploited by her parents, living in the gutters of Paris, yet she retains the spiritual outlook and purity of a saint. We are spared no brutality, yet there are scenes of the most tender beauty.The woman, Clotilde, becomes an artist's model, meeting all the great French writers, among them the gloomy and magnificent Marchenoir, who is Bloy himself. They are all impressed by the depth of her thoughts and feelings; she finally marries one of them. They are pitifully poor, and the pages that cover the birth and death of their child shock with horror while moving the reader in their tragic beauty and tenderness––for this is Bloy, always hovering between death and ecstasy. Left a widow, Clotilda finds her true vocation, a vocation of poverty. She is the woman who is poor, no other words describe her more accurately. The novel ends with those famous words of extraordinary optimism: "There is only one misery…not to be saints."

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This volume consists of the addresses delivered to the 22nd Annuel Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars held in Chicago in September 1999. Each chapter includes a discussion of one of the major themes related to the contemporary question of marriage and the common good expounded by a competent senior scholar, followed by a response on the major issues that concern marriage and the family today.

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Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, was one of the few unalloyed heroes of World War II. At great Personal risk, he saved some 800,000 Jews from extermination by the Nazis. Jewish refugees were given asylum in the Vatican, swelling the number of Swiss Guards. No allied leader can match his glorious record. Glolda Meir lauded Pius XII after the war, and the chief rabbi of Rome became a Roman Catholic, taking the name of Eugenio in tribute to Eugenio Pacelli. Why then has such a man been vilified and all but accused of being responsible for the Holocaust? Rolf Hochhuth's infamous play, 'The Deputy', marked the turning point. The outrageous distortions of this play turned the greatest friend the Jewish people had during World War II into an anti-Semite. This book restores Pius XII to the rank of hero, demolishes the ludicrous charges against him, and identifies the true target of this infamous calumny: the Church, the papacy, and the Christian moral teaching which confronts and condemns the Culture of Death.

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This, the sequel to the same author's much-acclaimed 'Xanthippic Dialogues,' is a multi-faceted commentary on the post-modern condition, which takes the form of part-Hellenistic, part-Arabian fairy tale. Archeanassa of Colophon, subject of a poem attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Plato, has returned to her birthplace in search of the lost manuscripts of another ex-lover, the poet Antimachus. There, she encounters Perictione, Plato's niece, who loves alone in the ruined and brutalized city amid memories and dreams. Perictione tells the strange story of Merope of Sardis, the Nietzshean philosopher who both made and destroyed her life. Little by little Archeanassa comes to recognize that Perictiones story is also her own story, and that the mystery of Colophon is the mystery of modernity itself. Through dialogues, stories and fantasies, the narrative explores the aesthetic way of life, and the possibilities of meaning in an age of inverted commas.

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Professor Conyers clearly defines the meaning of the supernatural in the face of common misconceptions, documents its denial in our own time (disabusing those who point to a growing interest in religion as a contrary trend) and examines the full implication such a denial has for the quality of the lives that we live.

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Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary critic, exchanged e-mails sporadically over the years, usually commenting on each other’s various writings. Then one day in 2009, Raphael wrote to Epstein to suggest that, since they enjoyed a benevolence toward each other unusual among literary men, they begin an exchange of e-mail correspondence on a regular basis. His thought was that, at the end of a year or so, the result might be an interesting book. Epstein, who had long admired Raphael’s writing, agreed. The two men had never met, nor had they even spoken over the phone. Their friendship was conducted entirely online. Each week they exchanged e-mails of roughly 2,000 words. They discovered a great many things about each other they hadn’t previously known. They shared, for example, a common birthplace in Chicago, where Raphael was born, though his family moved to England in 1938, and his education after that was exclusively English. Each man belongs to that dolorous fraternity of those who have buried a child. Their literary tastes vary, though not widely, since both grew up admiring the great modernist writers and both had an enduring love for Greek and Roman culture. Both men share a fundamental agreement about what, in artistic and intellectual realms, is serious. Raphael and Epstein are artists who happen also to be intellectuals. The result is that few subjects are off limits to them. They are of an age when they have long ceased to worry about their reputations. Wherever else they may look, it is not over their shoulders. Candor reinforced by comedy is the reigning note of Where Were We? as it was of Distant Intimacy, their earlier volume of e-mail correspondence. Writing about other writers, actors, politics, the movies, intellectual fashions, the writing life, and much else, both men say precisely what they think, and say it in high style. Readers may or may not agree with their strong views, but they will never find their thoughts other than fascinating.

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Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), best known as the wife of the famous French philosopherJacques Maritain, was a remarkable person in her own right. A poet, philosopher,translator, and mystic, she was at the epicenter of French intellectual life in the first halfof the twentieth century. Her autobiography, We Have Been Friends Together, together withthe second part, Adventures in Grace, were originally published in two volumes in 1941and 1944. Both books are combined here and are now being re-issued for the first time.She chronicles not only her and her husband’s lives but also those of their friends—animpressive circle of important French intellectuals, writers, artists, professors, andinfluential priests. In luminous prose Raïssa recounts her childhood in Russia, her youthin Paris, and her momentous meeting with Jacques, followed by their conversion toCatholicism in 1906. She gives a vivid, personal account of the Thomistic Revival theyhelped to lead and describes the conversions of key figures in the French CatholicRenaissance—many of whom were the Maritains’ close friends. However, the underlyingsubjects of her autobiography are God’s goodness, the mysterious operation of grace inthe soul, and the way that Raïssa and others were transformed by their encounter withthe Divine. We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace are spiritual autobiographieswritten by a mystic with a difference. Raïssa was totally God-focused, but, unlike mostmystics, she was not a religious by vocation. She attended the Sorbonne, married, andassociated with the intellectual lights of Paris, New York, and Rome. She wrote a bookfor children, and published poetry, works on prayer, translations, and studies of modernauthors. Raïssa also played a key role in the conversion of many and knew, oftenintimately, intellectuals like Ernest Psichari and Charles Péguy, the playwright Cocteau,the authors Mauriac, Claudel, and Bloy, and a number of painters, including GeorgesRouault. Readers interested in spiritual biography, in mystics, in modern womenauthors, in the psychology of conversion, in twentieth-century French intellectual life,and in the Thomistic revival will find this book fascinating. Raïssa’s autobiography willalso hold a special place in the heart of all those who believe, as did her godfather LéonBloy, “There is only one misery . . . not to be saints.”

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Acclaimed British historian examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a backstage tour of the meaning and context of Britain's most beloved stories and story-tellers.

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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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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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One of the gravest and most divisive issues confronting the Catholic Church in recent decades – a major factor in an ongoing institutionalized rupture between Rome and at least half a million traditionalist Catholics – is the question of whether Vatican II’s Declaration Dignitatis Humanae can be reconciled with traditional Church doctrine on religious liberty. In this spirited exchange of essays on a topic central to our understanding of justice and human rights, Arnold Guminski and Fr. Brian Harrison debate this difficult question. Guminski argues that DH teaches that there is (and always has been) a natural right not to be prevented from publicly propagating or manifesting non-Catholic religions, subject to the exigencies of a just public order, which is to be understood as not presupposing the truth of natural or any positive religion (including Catholicism), or any supernatural considerations. Harrison disagrees. In his view, DH nowhere teaches that it is always and everywhere unjust for civil authorities to presuppose the truth of Roman Catholicism in determining what restrictions a just public order allows. According to Harrison, the central innovative feature of DH is its clearly implied prudential policy judgment, or norm of ecclesiastical public law, to the effect that in the modern world – so very different from the old Christendom – repression of the public propagation or manifestation of non-Catholic religions as such can no longer be justified by the requirements of the common good. Harrison argues that precisely because this undeniable reversal of the Church’s previous position belongs in the category of changeable prudential judgments, it does not constitute a doctrinal rupture with Catholic tradition. Guminski, on the other hand, contends that the doctrine of DH, properly understood, is inconsistent with relevant preconciliar doctrine. The latter, in his view, was never proposed definitively – i.e., infallibly. Both authors agee to a comprehensive theory of the nature and scope of the Church’s inherent coercive power as it pertains to liberty in religious matters. They agree that this power is limited to the imposition of spiritual penalties and temporal penalties, and that the Church’s inherent coercive power nevertheless must be exercised within the limits of a just public order.

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Here are seven readable biographical sketches of important people who influenced the times in which they lived by bringing their faith to bear on social issues. In writing about them the author incorporates biography, theology, and politics into a coherent whole portrait of the subjects. Present day journals like First Things, National Review, and Christianity Today began as an extension of the personalities of the people profiled in this book, whose interests guided faithful believers in the midst of changing and turbulent times. The Politics of Morality combines a scholarly penchant for fact with historical evidence to show how these men connected the principles of government with the ideals of Christianity. Here is the story of Russell Kirk’s original vision, and William F. Buckley’s ornery conservative conscience. Francis Schaeffer’s zealous evangelicalism meets Richard J. Neuhaus’s keen insight and Chuck Colson’s passion for justice. Carl F.H. Henry’s novel vision for a Christian magazine is compared to Michael Novak’s refutation of socialism. This book is a help because it analyzes the lives of people who remain influential in bringing Christian principles to bear on issues in the public square. Anyone interested in current issues has something to learn from the life and work of these individuals.

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To those who think they know what George Orwell is all about, this book unpacks surprise after surprise. Orwell Your Orwell reveals an Orwell very different from the one most people think of. It gives an unexpected yet convincing picture of Orwell’s beliefs, every key point precisely documented. Orwell adopted a habitual rhetoric in which he portrayed himself as a lone, embattled dissident. But objectively examined, his opinions broadly corresponded with those of conventional leftwing thinking. Far from being skeptical of prevailing orthodoxies, Orwell emerges as a True Believer in the orthodoxies of the 1930s Left, though a believer who sharply drew attention to some of the serious problems with these ideologies. In his short life, Orwell underwent several dramatic conversions – such as his overnight switch in August 1939 from being fiercely anti-war to enthusiastically pro-war – while cleaving to some fixed positions – such as his opposition to the British Empire, totalitarianism, and birth control. Dr. Steele identifies both the conversions and the continuities, as well as some aspects of his thought which gradually evolved. As well as recovering Orwell’s actual beliefs from the many accumulated misrepresentations, Dr. Steele also criticizes some of these beliefs, exposing the fallacies in Orwell’s thinking on such issues as the economics of imperialism, the dangers of hedonism, the significance of the Spanish Civil War, and the efficacy of mind control.Reviews: “This is an absolutely dazzling book on Orwell, casting a brilliant new light, not just on Orwell himself, but on the entire intellectual history of our time. It is a ‘must read’, not just for devotees of Orwell, but for anyone concerned with discussions of socialism and capitalism, totalitarianism and democracy, ideological passion and intellectual honesty. It will prove a superb teaching aid at both undergraduate and graduate levels.”—Yuri Maltsev, co-author of The Tea Party Explained and editor of Requiem for Marx “There has always been some mystery about how Orwell could give us the nightmare world of Ingsoc (English Socialism) while himself remaining an unrepentant English Socialist. This and other puzzles about Orwell are convincingly solved in Dr. Steele’s masterly account. If you want to know what made Orwell tick, you just have to read this eloquent, provocative, and hugely entertaining book.”—Barry Smith, Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and author of Austrian Philosophy

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"Re-reading is one of life's joys," Anne Drury Hall reminds us. Not simply from the sweetness of remembering or because of the way a book can be like an old friend, but because returning to a great book is inseparable from the endeavor to succeed at being human. The "pull of something old and steady and reliable, the pull to rise to a higher plane" is an important aspect of this experience, where the reader truly "notices" and "connects" with the world and himself. This is why books are the cornerstones of education and the source of the power of concentration. After leaving school and becoming lost in adulthood, can one return to these books and revive the quest to be great? For this is why we call such books "great". Yet as Hall says, "few people use the phrase 'great books' any more except ironically, because there is an odd view in the current intellectual fog that there is no such thing as 'greatness'". She is compelled, then, to reexamine the so-called great books and make the case for their eternal importance. It is a task that requires not only swimming against the disenchanted march of the post-modern reader into adulthood, but also asserting the unthinkable––namely, that great books were written by great men who achieved this status through their own labor and endurance. Hall reintroduces the reader to Plato, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Melville and hopes this will expose the fraud of most of contemporary literature, and encourage taste and stamina for the works that promise to exhilarate. And Hall argues well that the thrill of these books draws from one shared feature: "The heart of these books is the drama of choice." If Roger Scruton is famous for showing us that ideas have consequences, Hall provides the reader the vision of himself as standing on the brink and the urgency of taking life seriously again. For many this means taking books seriously again. This book is an important companion to the works treated therein, for teachers and students alike. Both need encouragement in the laboring of instruction or reading the impressive classics. Particularly apt is Hall's treatment of the difficulty of teaching Shakespeare. For the not-so-recent university graduate, perhaps this book will bring him once again to wander where the Muses still haunt. Indeed, even the well-read will enjoy Hall's keen interpretation of the glory of these stories. This is a book written by a true teacher.

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Moderately Modern wears its thesis on its sleeve. Modern men and women, those thoroughly imbued with modernity’s ideas, hopes, and projects, need to moderate themselves. They need to rein themselves in, they need to think and act beyond their comfort zone. Implicit in this claim, of course, is a slew of topics, claims, and an argument. What is modernity? What’s lacking in it? Where should its adherents look outside and beyond it? What would they find? And what would a conjunction of a chastened modernity and a newly respected outside look like? It would be difficult to find someone more equipped to raise and pursue these questions than Rémi Brague. Le règne de l’homme: l’echec du projet modern (The kingdom of man: the failure of the modern project) already laid out his basic views: modernity is the project of radical anthropocentrism, of man construed as the sovereign of the world and of his very humanity. If the traditional order of the West located man within a wider scheme of God/world/man, with the former two providing models of excellence for the latter, then modern thought reverses the order, expelling God and the divine from public centrality and, by means of technological science, aiming to make man, in Descartes’ famous phrase, “master and possessor of Nature”. The Legitimacy of the Human picks up the theme and surveys the results. Birth dearths, looming ecological disasters, and the threat of destruction on enormous scales testify to something having gone terribly awry. Its concluding chapters advise a reconsideration of the rejected premodern option: the biblical God and his providential care. Moderately Modern brings all of the foregoing together, mixing cultural critique with cultural restoration. It does so in characteristically Braguean ways: attention to the meaning and history of important terms; brilliant aperçus of the contemporary scene; enormous learning worn lightly and brought to bear deftly; a personal tone with intellectual and spiritual gravitas. His theme being the current condition of the West, this son of the West brings to bear all that she has made available to her children to live thoughtful and genuinely human lives. Let us hope that he is not a Cassandra, but more akin to Isaiah, albeit in a philosophical mode.

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“As Alasdair MacIntyre notes in the preface, the work of Pinckaers attracted strongand fully justified notice in this country with the publication in English of his TheSources of Christian Ethics. As Pinckaers himself notes in the text, excellently translatedby Michael Sherwin, the interest should in no way be limited to RomanCatholics. Morality recasts the earlier book in an argument that is both lower andupper case ‘catholic,’ and is accessible to readers and teachers outside the limitedcircle of moral theologians and academic ethicists. Pinckaers contends thatChristian morality is not first of all about obligations but about happiness, understandingthat the happiness of union with God is our natural destiny made possibleby grace. The Sermon on the Mount is at the center of an approach to moralitythat turns on the distinction between ‘freedom for excellence’ and ‘freedom ofindifference,’ the former understood as human flourishing and the latter as a ‘neutral’capacity to choose between controversies. The proposal of Morality is thoroughlyChrist-centered, humanistic, and faithful to the magisterial teaching of theChurch. Warmly recommended.”First Things “If you want to have the experience of reflecting on Catholic morality as thoughyou were reading about it for the first time, treat yourself to Father ServaisPinckaers’ Morality: The Catholic View. He has recovered the classical view of themoral life as the quest for happiness and has presented it with disarming simplicity.Bringing us back to the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 12–15, the writingsof Augustine and Aquinas, and the theme of natural law, he has freed those textsfrom the layers of legalism which has hidden their liberating, spiritual powers formoral living. By distinguishing freedom of indifference from freedom for excellence,he has restored a wise vision of freedom. No one has shown better the roleof virtues as building blocks for morality. Catechists need to read this book.”Rev. Alfred McBride, O.Praem., Professor of Homilectics and Catechetics at BlessedPope John XXIII Seminary, Weston, Massachusetts “Father Pinckaers has given us a masterful exposition of Christian living. The clarityand brevity of his presentation – captured well by the translator – make this bookideal for classroom and parish use. “Readers will find the historical and systematic observations very informative.”Romanus Cessario, St. John’s Seminary, Brighton, Massachusetts

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Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, on June 4–5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss’s intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen “the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times. However, one must be well aware that philosophizing always means a perilous way of life. Indeed, it may be destructive of the city (polis) itself as far as the city exists due to some crucial beliefs the philosopher might put in doubt. Reflecting on those issues, Strauss engaged in several highly important debates with his contemporaries, in an open way with, e.g., Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith and Alexandre Kojève, and more tacitly with Martin Heidegger.

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Among all the fifty-six men who have served as New York’s governor, none was more complicated, self-righteous, pugilistic, and exasperating than Mario Cuomo. As governor, Mario Cuomo is remembered most for his advocacy of the “personally-opposed-but” position on abortion that led to confrontations with Catholic Church hierarchy, and for dithering about his presidential ambitions, that led the media to dub him the “Hamlet on the Hudson.” His political style reminded many of Machiavelli; Cuomo styled himself a successor to St. Thomas More. In this political profile, George J. Marlin sets the record straight on Mario Cuomo. Marlin traces Cuomo’s political rise and documents how and why he abandoned his public opposition to abortion to be elected New York’s chief executive. In great detail, Marlin describes the protracted conflict between Cuomo and his church on abortion and refutes the governor’s claim that his “position on abortion is absolutely theologically sound.” Marlin critiques Cuomo’s famous 1984 Democratic convention speech as nothing more than the usual high-toned partisan liberal bromides that offered little, if anything, that hadn’t been touted by his party for half a century. The book also uncovers New York State’s fiscal, economic, and social decline during Cuomo’s 12 years as governor. It explains why voters repudiated Cuomo’s version of a welfare state when he sought a fourth term in 1994 and why, in the words of his son, Governor Andrew Cuomo, his father was “more accomplished as a speech-giver than as a governor.” Marlin skillfully separates the Cuomo “Public Intellectual” myth from the political man. Mario Cuomo, three times Governor of New York, an eloquent hard edged Catholic from Queens, dominated not only his home state but national liberal politics in the age of Reagan. Whether the subject was police or theology, Cuomo rhetorically overpowered the reporters who covered him. But he’s finally met his match in George Marlin’s Mario Cuomo The Myth and the Man. Marlin’s extraordinary equipment; a former candidate for Mayor of N.Y.C., former executive director of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, author of books on Catholic voters and the Archbishops of New York, has made him the ideal author of what’s sure to be seen as the definitive political biography of Mario Cuomo. — Fred Siegel, Author, The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life and The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. “It’s easy to forget what an important and fascinating figure Mario Cuomo was during New York’s raucous political heyday of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, when the likes of Hugh Carey, Ed Koch, Al D’Amato, and Rudy Giuliani strode the political stage. Thankfully, George Marlin’s wonderful new Cuomo biography will help everyone remember both the good and bad of the remarkable man who served three terms as governor, turned down a seat on the Supreme Court and rejected the chance to run for President. Here are both Cuomo’s successes and failures — and of the latter there were many. An important work that helps restore our collective memory. — Fredric U. Dicker, the New York Post’s longtime state editor and a TV and radio commentator, covered six governors during 40 years at the state Capitol in Albany. George Marlin is virtually peerless in blending high principle with knowledge of street-level politics and the nuts-and-bolts of otherwise mundane governance to produce readable, yet deeply insightful, social and political portraits. Mario Cuomo: The Myth and the Man, examines in fine detail one of one of New York state’s most consequential, if also deeply flawed, 20th-century gubernatorial incumbencies. Plus, readers get a bonus: Insight into what shaped the career of Mario Cuomo’s Democratic superstar son, Andrew. Marlin has been in the trenches himself and thus can separate blarney from beefsteak – which this fine volume once again demonstrates. —Bob McManus, Contributing Editor, The City Journal, was the New York Post’s Editorial Page Editor (2000-2013), and The Albany Times Union’s Executive City Editor (1975-1981). “George Marlin not only captures the political life and journey of Mario Cuomo, but details his policy approach that led to the near demise of the Empire State. Fortunately, the Conservative Party of New York was there to carry the torch and provide the margin of victory for George Pataki ending the senior Cuomo’s reign.” —Michael Long, State Chairman, Conservative Party of New York (1988-2019) “For both better and worse, Mario Cuomo was the quintessential American Catholic politician of an entire postwar generation: ambitious, brilliant, articulate, serious about his faith, and flexible in how and where he applied it. George Marlin is a writer of considerable skill, and he uses here it to produce a provocative, absorbing portrait of the man and his career. —Francis X. Maier, Senior Fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

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Written by the renowned British historian who has been described as both utterly thorough and humanely delicate, Jeremy Black offers a guided tour through the mind of Agatha Christie and life during the Great World Wars. His incomparable treatment of literary craft developing alongside global military engagement nearly overshadows the natural draw of the crime drama that is the subject of his book. Indeed, the “prurience and sensationalism” of crime is not as exciting as Black’s aptitude for drawing the reality from the fiction (and periphery sources), giving Christie a much louder voice than she might ever have dreamed. If Christie is also moralist and mirror to her times, Black here plays his part as the detective and reveals layers of previously unmined truths in her stories. Hercule Poirot as a character is masterfully imagined, but Black shows us how he is inseparable from Christie’s turbulent and changing world. He also illuminates significant social commentary in Christie’s fiction, and in so doing Black often uses his authority to vindicate Christie’s work from hastily, at times stupidly, applied labels and interpretations. He is especially magnificent in his chapters, “Xenophobia” and “The Sixties.” Black nevertheless gives due recognition to Christie’s critics when they have something relevant and reasonable to say, and hence the reader finds yet another service in Black’s comprehensive review of the reviewers over the expanse of Christie’s writing career. For all this, Black proves himself to be a worthy history-teller because he can aptly ‘detect’ the meaning of stories that seeks to answer the past and guide the present. His erudition runs much deeper than his ability to navigate the stores of resources available on the subject, and the reader gets a glimpse of this early on when in the introduction he proffers his own defense for writing about the importance of a Hercule Poirot. Black writes, “the notion of crime had a moral component from the outset, and notably so in terms of the struggle between Good and Evil, and in the detection of the latter. Indeed, it is this detection that is the basis of the most powerful strand of detection story, because Evil disguises its purposes. It has to do so in a world and humanity made fundamentally benign and moral by God.” The Golden Age of detective novels represents much more than a triumph of a literary genre. It is in its own right a story of how the challenge to address the problem of evil was accepted. Its convergence with the plot-rich narrative of the twentieth century in the modern age renders Black’s account a thrilling masterpiece, seducing historians to read fiction and crime junkies to read more history.

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D.H. Tracy’s debut volume, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize, marks a major event in contemporary poetry. Janet’s Cottage collects the richly textured, highly musical poems that have become Tracy’s hallmark in America’s finest literary journals, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Tracy brings buoyant wit and piercing intelligence to a range of poetic subjects, both intimate and domestic (“Janet’s Cottage”) and exotic and far-flung (“Impressions of the Tribeless”). Whether he is riffing on a string of clichés, making worn-out phrases shine again, or spinning out a deft conceit that even John Donne himself would have admired, Tracy never fails to surprise and delight. What strikes the reader most about Tracy’s work is the sheer abundance of his imagination. The unique vision of the world that he conveys in poem after poem dazzles at first and is sure to stay with readers long after.

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Eric Voegelin was a German-born political theorist who fled Nazi persecution and immigrated to the United States in 1938, where he had a long and productive academic career. He is widely considered one of the most insightful political scientists of the twentieth century, but is sadly not as well known as other contemporaries like Leo Strauss or Hannah Arendt. This is in large part due to the difficulty of the topics he chose to study and the complex nature of the material produced. While there are other books that discuss his biography and academic/philosophical ideas, none combine these ideas with a practical means of actually utilizing Voegelin’s philosophy to define and analyze political reality. This book uniquely applys Voegelin’s ideas to real-world political problems and in its utilization of common language, making Voegelin’s extraordinary achievements much more accessible to a broader audience than any other previous work. Voegelin’s highly original thinking was heavily influenced by the violent and tumultuous times in which he lived. Because the events of his life are so influential, a brief but thorough biography is presented in the first chapter. The “Western Crisis” he recognized in modern Western culture is revealed as the motivation of Voegelin’s quest for truth and the resistance he thought vital to the strains of Gnosticism he felt rejected reality and the symbols needed to articulate it. Because Gnosticism is such a central theme in understanding Voegelin’s work, an extensive exploration is conducted on Gnostic origins, history, some complications in the use of this term, and how Voegelin’s concept of it evolved over the course of his career. The first chapter concludes with and examination of Voegelin’s use of symbol and language indices. Chapter two begins with an introduction to Voegelin’s views of how science, theology, and philosophy were used in the ancient world to reveal truth, the basis of order, and how humanity can move away from order by disregarding what the ancients revealed. This is followed by an examination of one of Voegelin’s most important contributions, his theory of consciousness and use of anamnesis. Chapter two concludes with a description of noesis’ relationship to political reality and how Voegelin’s quest to know truth and reality led him to question the state of political science and modernity’s willingness to seek truth. Chapter three, on Voegelin’s mature political theory, is best described as Principia Noetic, so labeled by Ellis Sandoz. Voegelin asserts that political reality is revealed when the basis of order is found in the ground of being. When man separates himself from God, order is lost, and violence and tyranny are guaranteed as man makes himself the sole arbiter of moral and political order, unrestricted by notions of the divine. The reader of this book should come away with a deep understanding of Voegelin’s philosophical insights found in the Principia Noetica, how to apply them in understanding political reality, and how to recognize the symptoms of the “Western Crisis.”

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These stories represent an intermediate stage in the evolution of the Knight brothers in Ralph McInerny’s fiction. In The Noonday Devil, Phil, in his capacity as private detective, was fairly close to the action, but by no means the major character. Roger, his blimp-sized brother, entered obliquely into the story but ended by starring in the finale. Readers liked them, in particular Roger. So McInerny brought them back in Easeful Death, where they are far more central and Roger occupies much space, physically and narratively. And so it might have remained. When McInerny was asked to do a Notre Dame series of mysteries, he decided to bring Roger to South Bend as the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, accompanied by the semi-retired Phil, who has the full menu of Notre Dame sports to keep him occupied. Prior to starting the series, McInerny wanted to reacquaint himself with the Knights and hit upon the idea of doing a series of Knight brothers stories in Crisis, a magazine he founded with Michael Novak. Before moving them to South Bend, he wanted to see them in action, working out of New York, always driving in the specially designed van, never flying, to the cities were their client lived. Good Knights is the result of putting these eight Knights brothers’ stories together. Call them finger exercises in character. The response to them in the magazine was gratifying, and with them behind him, McInerny launched the Notre Dame series, with On This Rockne in 1996, thirteen years and thirteen novels ago. But the origins of that successful series is seen here.

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This title, which at first sight seems curious, shows Pieper’s philosophical work as rooted in the basics. He takes his inspiration from Plato – and his Socrates – and Thomas Aquinas. With them, he is interested in philosophy as pure theory, the theoretical being precisely the non-practical. The philosophizer wants to know what all existence is fundamentally about, what “reality” “really” means. With Plato, Pieper eschews the use of language to convince an audience of anything which is not the truth. If Plato was opposed to the sophists – amongst them the politicians –, Pieper is likewise opposed to discourse that leads to the “use” of philosophy to bolster a totalitarian regime or any political or economic system. A fundamental issue for Pieper is “createdness.” He sees this as the fundamental truth of our being – all being – and the fundamental virtue we can practise is the striving to live according to our perception of real truth in any given situation. The strength and attraction of Pieper’s writing is its direct and intuitive character which is independent of abstract systematization. He advocates staying in touch with the “real” as we experience it deep within ourselves. Openness to the totality of being – in no matter what context being reveals itself – and the affirmation of all that is founded in this totality are central pillars of all his thinking. Given the “simplicity” of this stance, it is no surprise that much of it is communicated – and successfully – through his gift for illustration by anecdote. Like Plato, this philosopher is a story-teller and, like him, very readable.

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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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Histories and biographies of Winston Churchill frequently mention his friends. Some comment on their importance but few explain their significance. Indeed, he rarely spoke of his friendships. However, his concern for friends and for friendship always seems to hover above, or in the background, of his statecraft and in his thinking about statecraft and politics. This book brings friendship into focus as a central component of Churchill’s understanding of politics and statesmanship. Regarding friendship as a key to politics seems archaic or even elitist today in the minds of many. But for many of the greatest statesmen of the past and even of contemporary times, friendship has been the central category of their statecraft and their moral vision of politics. Churchill was one of those statesmen. This book examines friendship as the core of Churchill’s moral vision of politics by considering both his practice of friendship, as well as his thoughts on friendship in political life. It examines some of the friendships he conducted in his political life, including with Lord Birkenhead (F. E. Smith), Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It also examines his historical and political writings to explain how he regarded friendship also as a goal for political life. He regarded Parliament as a club of friends who esteemed their friendships, as parliamentarians who are custodians of the common, as nobler than the partisan differences that divided them. The idea of trans-partisan friendships also animated the “Other Club” he founded with Birkenhead. Indeed, Churchill thought parliamentary democracy, more than other regimes, depends upon the friendliness of its statesmen and its citizens to mitigate the heat of factional strife. For him, parliamentary democracy depends on personal friendships of the highest order to sustain the forms and formalities of the regime, as well as the political friendship upon which they are based. Churchill’s biography of his great ancestor John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, is his greatest statement of his political wisdom that consists also of a sustained statement on the centrality of friendship in politics. His view of Great Britain as an “island story” is also his expression of a political friendship expressed as a long historical adventure, much as he his personal friendships within politics as great adventures. Because adventures get sung about, he was its main singer, whose “songs” appeared as his speeches and extensive historical writings. As a book about Churchill’s moral vision for politics, this book asks a philosophical question by considering his life, political actions, and writings. This book is not a biographical or historical description of Churchill and his friends. This is more of a character sketch, or a work of “empirical political philosophy” because of the philosophical exposition it provides of the actions and speeches of a creative prince such as Churchill. This book describes how Churchill understood friendship as the essence of statesmanship.

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Following an ardent debate in the 1930s on the question over whether something like a “Christian philosophy” exists, as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and others held, the term was used by many thinkers and rejected by many others, not only by Heidegger who called it a contradiction in terms, an “iron wood,” but also by Thomists who wanted to see philosophy and Christian faith strictly separated. Seifert analyses five understandings of the term “Christian philosophy” which have never been expounded with such clarity and which he rejects for different, partly for opposite, reasons. He presents these senses of Christian philosophy, and his reasons for rejecting them, in clear, straight-forward language. He presents for the first time a series of eleven wholly different and thoroughly positive and fruitful ways of understanding the (rather misleading) term “Christian philosophy.” Identifying and distinguishing these legitimate ways to speak of “Christian philosophy” shed light on the manifold fruitful relations between reason and faith. In a second part of the book, Seifert gives an example of Christian philosophy in the sense of a philosophy of religion that shows the absolute presupposedness and necessity of the existence of human, divine, and angelic free will to make any sense of divine revelation and of Christian (but also of Muslim and Jewish) religion. In a third part, he presents a penetrating analysis of seven indubitable evidences that demonstrate the nature and real existence of human free will (in a so-called “libertarian” sense that rejects the thesis of the compatibility between free will and determinism). The book is introduced by the eminent Thomist philosopher, John Finnis.

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A year into the global pandemic, Gene Fendt repositions the attention of the Western world on a literary classic that bears a vital perspective. Presently, civilization cannot allow itself to think about being better. First it has to survive. Referencing Thomas Merton’s claim that Camus’ fictional account is actually a “modern myth about the destiny of man” and indication of the blight of “ambiguous and false explanations, interpretations, conventions, justifications, legalizations, evasions which infect our struggling civilization,” Fendt makes the case that “modernity itself is a time of plague.” Fendt asserts that perhaps “the originality of the modern plague is that most people admit of no symptoms.” This chilling likeness to the asymptomatic Covid-19 victim is but one of the images of what the plague stands for in both the novel and contemporary society. The existentialist fiction of Camus is unwrapped by Fendt’s fidelity to realism and Camus’ motivations as an artist. As Camus calls nihilistic art and culture “barbaric,” Fendt calls the barbarian a natural slave. If we are moved by the forces of powers that be without sense or knowledge of a proper end, we too have been rendered worse than ignorant. Beyond the presentation of The Plague as a myth, Fendt also provides generous insight into elements of this work that give an autobiographical portrait of Albert Camus´ artistic development. He provides an intelligent challenge to labeling Camus an atheist, if Camus is truly the artist Fendt believes him to be. It is also an unlikely but important contribution to the political philosophical study of solidarity.

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A hallmark of Western culture is a massive moral confusion, rendering the very idea of virtue “exotic and incomprehensible.” McInerny here drags the conversation back to the beginning, establishing the terms and the tools of what it means to think and to do what is moral. As he asserts, the virtuous life and the moral life are one and the same. To be moral is to be good, and the goodness of one’s acts reflects the fundamentals of thought placed in the service of a pursuit of a virtuous life. Why is the concept of a virtuous life so foreign to many? We do not know the basics of a moral life. As McInerny states, “To be good we have to know what that means.” The two biggest judgments one will make during life pertain to knowing what is good, what is bad, and the difference between the two. This bleeds into a study of morality and ethics when it pertains to concrete acts, but in reality all aspects of our lives bear on these judgments. “Being ethical is not simply a state of mind, it is a state of being, a way of living one’s life that reflects the fundamental principles of ethics [...] [it is one] who lives in a certain way.” Nevertheless, the subject of this book focuses on ethics––namely, the goodness or badness of human acts. McInerny’s great reason for writing this work is to teach the reader that he or she cannot properly tackle ethical questions (even if they are not identified as such) if one is not himself or herself actually ethical (living virtuously). Writing very much as a teacher of teachers, McInerny relies on the foundations of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as his late brother, Ralph McInerny, to reiterate the principles of ethics that inform both thought and act. To speak of ethics, then, is to admit a commitment to virtue and how the theoretical distinction of good and bad is necessarily practical. Acting well will lead to thinking better, but McInerny notes that culture has lost sight of the former and thereby the coherency to address ethical questions. Being Ethical aims to correct this disconnect in forty-eight cogent lessons. Being Ethical is fundamentally intended to serve as a sequel to D. Q. McInerny’s Being Logical (Random House, 2004), which has remained in print and has been translated into six languages. Its style lends itself to being used as a textbook in liberal studies. More generally, it is a refreshing presentation of this topic and timely and timeless exhortation to readers of the necessity of a love of virtue for ethical thought. For friends and students of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Ralph McInerny, this book bears a style and manner that is both familiar and much loved.

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In this insightful and controversial book, Rosen takes a new look at the famous "quarrel" that the moderns have with the ancients, analyzing and comparing ancient philosophers and modern Continental and analytical thinkers from Plato, Descartes, and Kant to Fichte, Nietzsche, and Rorty. He urges that we not dismiss the classical heritage but appropriate it, for this appropriation is an indispensable step in the process of legitimizing our historical experience. According to Rosen, the quarrel that is significant is not between ancients and moderns but between philosophy and sophistry, for the continuous attempt of Western civilization to prevent playfulness from degenerating into frivolity constitutes the unity of historical experience. The contemporary crisis of modernity as expressed by catchwords such as post-modernism, antiplatonism, postphilosophy, and deconstruction, could lead to a disintegration of this historical unity. But it also presents an opportunity for rejuvenation, provided that we are capable of the fidelity to the past that is the necessary condition for a future.

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Historian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail––namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much about "morality and deploying history accordingly." The true interest of the Gothic novel is more remarkable than it is grisly: the featured darkness and macabre are not meant to usurp heroism and purity, but will fall hard under the over-ruling hand of Providence and certainty of retribution. Black's understanding of the Gothic writer is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of British literature and the novel at large. Once again, in Black thoroughness meets fidelity and the reader is overcome with his own insights into the period on the merit of Black's efforts. In The Weight of Words Series, Black is devoted to the preservation of the memory of British literary genius, and in so doing he is carving out a niche for himself. As in the Gothic novel where landscapes give quarter to influences that seem to interact with the human fates that freely wander in, reading Black is an experience of suddenly finding oneself in possession of an education, and his allure takes a cue from the horrific Gothic tempt.

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This new and revised edition of Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic is updated, adding new exercises and more complete examples, all with Kreeft’s characteristic clarity and wit. Since its introduction in the spring of 2004, Socratic Logic has proven to be a different type of logic text:(1) This is the only complete system of classical Aristotelian logic in print. The “old logic” is still the natural logic of the four language arts (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). Symbolic, or “mathematical,” logic is not for the humanities. (How often have you heard someone argue in symbolic logic?)(2) This book is simple and user-friendly. It is highly interactive, with a plethora of exercises and a light, engaging style.(3) It is practical. It is designed for do-it-yourselfers as well as classrooms. It emphasizes topics in proportion to probable student use: e.g., interpreting ordinary language, not only analyzing but also constructing effective arguments, smoking out hidden assumptions, making “argument maps,” and using Socratic method in various circumstances.(4) It is philosophical. Its exercises expose students to many classical quotations, and additional chapters introduce philosophical issues in a Socratic manner and from a commonsense, realistic point of view. It prepares students for reading Great Books rather than Dick and Jane, and models Socrates as the beginner’s ideal teacher and philosopher.

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Few books have explored in depth the lack of men in the churches. Podles’ book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity was the first book-length attempt to examine this phenomenon. David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church was a popular presentation of Podles’ material. Marta Trzebiatowska’s and Steve Bruce’s short Why Are Women More Religious than Men? confines itself almost entirely to modern British and American examples. Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity explores the causes and consequences of the almost millennium-old disparity between the participation of lay men and lay women in the churches of Western Christianity. Podles considers both the anecdotal and statistical evidence for the lack of men: sermons, church rolls, censuses, and sociological analyses. Podles sees the intellectual roots of lack of men in the Aristotelian understanding of male and female as active and passive, an understanding which has formed all discussion of masculinity and femininity, from Aquinas through Schleiermacher, Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, all of whom saw femininity as more compatible with Christianity than masculinity. Men, according to anthropologists and psychologists, go through a difficult process to attain masculinity and therefore distance themselves from threats to that masculine identity, including Christianity. Men suspected the clergy was effeminate and sexually irregular. Historians of violence have examined the decline in violence in Europe and the civilizing role of the clergy, a role which further alienated men and led to violent anticlericalism Podles examines the presentation of Jesus’ masculinity in Scripture and images of Jesus’ masculinity in art, the role of thumos in spirituality, and the various movements that have helped keep men connected to the churches. He makes suggestions for possible outreach to men.

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The Western inheritance is under sustained theoretical and practical assault. Legitimate self-criticism has given way to nihilistic self-loathing and cultural, moral, and political repudiation is the order of the day. Yet, as Daniel J. Mahoney shows in this learned, eloquent, and provocative set of essays, two contemporary philosophic thinkers, Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent, have––separately and together––traced a path for the renewal of politics and practical reason, our civilized inheritance, the natural moral law, and the soul as the enduring site of self-conscious reflection, moral and civic agency, and mutual accountability. Both Scruton and Manent have repudiated the fashionable nihilism associated with the “thought of 1968” and the “Parisian nonsense machine,” and have shown that gratitude is the proper response of the human person to the “givenness of things.” Both defend the self-governing nation against reckless nationalism and the even more reckless temptation of supranational governance and post-political democracy, what Manent suggestively calls a “kratos” without a “demos.” Both defend the secular state while taking aim at a radical secularism that rejects “the Christian mark” that is at the heart of our inheritance and that sustains the rich and necessary interpenetration of truth and liberty. Scruton’s more “cultural” perspective is indebted to Burke and Kant; Manent’s more political perspective draws on Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron, among others. By highlighting their affinities, and reflecting on their instructive differences, Mahoney shows how, together, the English man of letters Scruton, and the French political philosopher Manent, guide us to the recovery of a horizon of thought and action animated by practical reason and the wellsprings of the human soul. They show us the humanizing path forward, but first we must make the necessary spiritual decision to repudiate repudiation once and for all. “With sophisticated and profound scholarship, Daniel Mahoney deploys his elegant style to defend the soul of civilization. Through the writings of Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton, he charts a course through the political and philosophical turmoil of the present age, providing hope and light amid the prevailing darkness.” — Mark Dooley, Irish philosopher, writer and journalist. Author of Conversations with Roger Scruton and Sir Roger's literary executor. “Mahoney's collection of essays does a marvelous job of contextualizing and explaining the vital work of these two philosophers. He's also an engaging and elegant writer.” — Daniel DiSalvo, City Journal “A series of reflective essays by Mahoney on the philosophical, theological, and political thinking of our best conservative theorists: Pierre Manent and the late Roger Scruton. Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul expresses well what we need.” — Richard M. Reinsch II, National Review

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Fr. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai, a native of Cameroon, has written a fresh, exciting new study of the lifelong engagement of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, with the German Enlightenment and its contemporary manifestations and heirs. Contemporary European disdain for organized religion and the rise in secularism on that continent has deep roots in the German Enlightenment. To understand contemporary Europe, one must return to this crucial epoch in its history, to those who shaped the European mind of this era, and to a study of the ideas they espoused and propagated. These ideas, for good or for ill, have taken hold in other parts of the modern world, being incarnated in many minds and institutions in contemporary society and threatening to enthrone a disfigured rationality without faith or a sense of Transcendence. Ratzinger’s extraordinary and sympathetic understanding of the sources of contemporary secularism equipped him to appreciate the gains of the Enlightenment, while still being a fierce critic of the losses humanity has suffered when reason falsely excludes faith. Fr. Agbaw-Ebai’s account reveals Ratzinger, in relation to his various interlocutors, to be the truly “enlightened” one because he demonstrates a truly balanced understanding of the human mind. To be truly rational one must be able to hold to faith and reason both, reason informed by faith in Jesus Christ. A particular merit of this book is Agbaw-Ebai’s presentation of Ratzinger’s treatment of the German Enlightenment’s greatest contributors: Kant, Nietzche, Hegel and Habermas, among others. In the postscript George Weigel characterizes what this study accomplishes in the larger framework of scholarship. “[Ratzinger’s] position remains too often misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately misinterpreted, throughout the whole Church. And to misunderstand, or misinterpret, Ratzinger is to misunderstand or misinterpret both the modern history of theology and the Second Vatican Council.” Agbaw-Ebai masterfully positions Ratzinger correctly in the history of ideas, and exhibits why Ratzinger will be remembered as one of its main players. Pure rationalists and true believers are equally indebted to him.

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