St. Augustine’s Press

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.

 The global pandemic has levied a heavy toll on humanity, but in its wake appears a great opportunity. Amidst what he calls a crisis of modernity, Giulio Maspero points to a phenomenon that can be seen in plain sight. "The absence of personal relationships highlighted by the health crisis exposes the consequences of the modern matrix, which, having lost its Christian element, now risks transforming itself into a digital matrix, substantially configuring itself as a technognosis."  

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.  

The De Anima (On the Soul) is the first and most general of Aristotle’s biological works and as such is the most important work in the study of nature after the Physics of Aristotle. It is presupposed to Aristotle’s Sense and the Sensible, Memory and Reminiscence, and his many other biological works.

The reader who approaches Descartes's first work “Cartesianly,” that is, epistemologically, is faced with an insurmountable difficulty: the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii is virtually incomprehensible in Cartesian terms. Indeed, Descartes himself appears to have disowned the work, after having put it aside, never to be completed. In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1975 to accompany an Index to the Regulae published in 1976 and a new French translation published in 1977, Jean-Luc Marion argues that the key to understanding the text – and the genesis of Cartesianism – is to read it as a dialogue with Aristotle. Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind becomes intelligible when the precise correspondence between its themes and various Aristotelian texts concerning science and being is established.

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. 

Fr. Maurice helps us to see how these two very different personal temperaments and philosophical methods meet and see a similar light, not despite their divergence but in and because of it. I found this work surprising and enlightening, and I found Fr. Maurice to be a reliable, sympathetic, and trustable guide through both of these challenging thinkers.

To call a philosopher "challenging" is often a negative euphemism for "difficult to comprehend." But in this case it is not negative but positive. Like Jesus and Socrates, both Kierkegaard and Blondel "challenge" us to a duel--a duel not with them but with some of our easiest and laziest assumptions about the intrinsic dynamism and restlessness of our very selves. This book should come with gentle warning labels to those who dislike that kind of challenge.

— Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College

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. 

 "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.)

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.

Janowski all at once brazen and out of bounds states what he calls the obvious and unthinkable truth: In the United States, we are already living in a totalitarian reality. The American citizen, the Homo Americanus, is an ideological being who is no longer good or bad, reasonable or irrational, proper or improper except when measured against the objectives of the dominating egalitarian mentality that American democracy has successfully incubated. American democracy has done what other despotic regimes have likewise achieved––namely, taken hold of the individual and forced him to renounce (or forget) his greatness, pursuit of virtue and his orientation toward history and Tradition.

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. 

The past becomes a source of wisdom when the scientific quest for uncovering the roots of things is combined with the humanistic endeavor to make the dead letter come alive in a thoughtful mind. Vague attempts at being “interdisciplinary,” by contrast, merely provide excuses to avoid examining the words set down by the scientific thinkers themselves. If we love wisdom in its wholeness, we must explore the sources of the things that we now take for granted: we must think through the records of the thinking that has demarcated the various fields of study and envisioned what’s to be investigated within them and how it’s to be done.

“The Analytic Thomist,” Rob Koons, delivered the 2021 Aquinas Lecture at the University of Dallas. Here he engages the possibility of a bridge between philosophy and metaphysics proper. Koons boldly lays out his position: without Aristotelian metaphysics, there is no Aristotelian philosophy of nature, and there is no philosophy of nature in Aristotle without acknowledging his natural science. His lecture thus challenges Thomists and their respective approaches to hylomorphism and their all too frequent quickness to discard it. (Koon lays down the gauntlet. if one denies hylomorphism there can be no transubstantiation!) 
 

This is the second volume, following the well-received edition of Mill’s writing essential to understanding the liberal tradition. His commentary on a full spectrum of issues gives further insight into the strengths and vulnerabilities of liberal democratic theory in practice. Rare and difficult to locate material is here brought to attention and made available. 

James Rhodes’ Plato is a playwright. And a mystic. In his famous “Seventh Letter” Plato had stated that the essence of his thought couldn’t be put into writing and hence he hadn’t done so. This is the self-interpretation of a mystic, Rhodes concludes. But then, two eminent questions arise: Why, then, did Plato write at all? And, how have his writings—his dialogues—to be understood, that is to be read?

Stanley Rosen completed The Language of Love in the early 1970s, but the manuscript was put aside and only rediscovered in 2013, the year before his death. The Language of Love is an interpretation of the Phaedrus that was meant to follow and complete Rosen’s Symposium commentary. Only two articles have been previously published. Rosen’s frequent references to the central passages and second half of the Phaedrus were more important in pointing up the importance of his absent full interpretation of the dialogue.

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.