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Mission Statement

St. Augustine’s Press publishes outstanding scholarly works in the fields of philosophy, theology, and cultural and intellectual history. These works include both new titles, new translations of works published in other languages, and reprints of out-of-print titles. Our mission is to offer exceptional works that draw from, exhibit, and advance Western civilization and particularly the traditional Judaeo-Christian roots of that civilization. Toward that end, we focus our attention on the timeless work over the timely, the classic over the atypical, the orthodox over the heterodox.

Emphasizing the timeless over the timely is an inherently conservative enterprise, but this should be understood as having less to do with public-policy options than with a search for the permanent things. Perhaps Richard Weaver’s playful definition remains the best one today: “Conservatism is a paradigm of the essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.”

St. Augustine’s Press aspires to understand our Western tradition. G. K. Chesterton, in his Orthodoxy (Chapter 4, “The Ethics of Elfland”), put this succinctly, “Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Chesterton goes on to say: “Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.”

The Press was incorporated in December 1996 as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization, tax exempt under section 501(a) of the Internal Revenue Code. Gifts to the Press are exempt from federal taxes.

St. Augustine’s Press was named in honor of Gerhart Niemeyer (1908–1998), an Augustine scholar, who was the mentor of the founder of the Press, Bruce Fingerhut.