St. Augustine’s Press

After Forty Years: Vatican Council II’s Diverse Legacy, as the title indicates, commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965. However, the book makes no attempt to deal with the legacy of Vatican II as a whole, that is, with the Council’s complete legacy, but only with some important parts of it. The Council as a whole represents a topic too vast to be covered within the confines of a single volume, as it was too vast to be covered within the confines of a single Fellowship of Catholic Scholars convention. This book covers those aspects of the Council that were of special interest to some of the leading scholars and academics active in the Fellowship. These favored topics were covered by means of the scholarly papers prepared especially for the Fellowship’s annual convention held in Charlotte, North Carolina, in September 2005. This book deals with the two great Constitutions on the Church (Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes); its epochal Constitution on Divine Revelation, and hence also on Scripture (Dei Verbum); its Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae); and its Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio). Because of the special interest of a number of the contributors, there is a heavy emphasis on the meaning and significance of the “anthropology” of Gaudium et Spes (the favorite Vatican II document of Pope John Paul II, by the way, who was one of the architects of this document at the Council). This book, however, is no superficial survey of the general ideas and thrust of the Second Vatican Council, as so many books on the subject turn out to be; but it is rather an in-depth look at the meaning an import of several of the Council’s most important themes and decisions. As is usual with the books based on Fellowship conventions, the volume contains a number of outstanding contributors, including Jesuit Father William S. Kurz of Marquette, Sister Mary Timothy Prokes, f.s.e., of the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College, and New York University’s Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Dr. Paul Vitz, now teaching at the new Institute for Psychological Sciences (IPS) in Northern Virginia.

The Church, Marriage, and the Family is a collection of studies mostly written from the point of view of Catholic teaching dealing primarily with marriage and the family, as the title indicates; but the book also ranges into such related topics as feminism, homosexuality, and even pornography. Prepared in connection with the 2004 International Year of the Family, it constituted the program for the 27th annual convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars (FCS). The contributions include those of some scholars with national and even international reputations such as the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family’s theologian William E. May (with a contribution entitled “The Good of Spouses and Marriage As a Vocation to Holiness”); historian Allan Carlson of the Howard Center and the Family Research Council (“The Future of Marriage and the Family in the United States: Some History Lessons”); and social scientist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute (“The Global War against Little Girls”).

A wide-ranging and enlightening discussion on creativity within the Catholic context.

Contents

Introduction: Kenneth D. Whitehead

Keynote Address: Finding the Sacred in the Profane: Twentieth-century Catholic Literature – Robert Royal

The Beauty of the Cross: The Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar – Rev. Raymond T. Gawronski, S.J.

Response to Father Raymond T. Gawronski – Larry Chapp

The Sacramental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien – C.N. Sue Abromaitis

Sacred Architecture and the Christian Imagination – Steven J. Schloeder

Response to Stephen J. Schloeder – Catherine Brown Tkacz

Cinema: The Power of Visual Imagery – Barbara R. Nicolosi

The Music of the Spheres; or, the Metaphysics of Music – Robert R. Reilly

Response to Robert R. Reilly – Rev. Basil Cole, O.P.

The John Cardinal Wright Award Acceptance Speech – Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D.

A New Era in the Renewal of the Liturgy – Helen Hull Hitchcock

Liturgiam Authenticam and the Prospects for Authentic Liturgical Renewal – Rev. Jerry Pokorsky

This work explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Scientism is a deformation of science, which unnecessarily restricts the scope of scientific inquiry by placing a dogmatic faith in the method of the natural sciences. Its adherents call for nothing less than a complete transformation of society. Science becomes the idol that can magically cure the perpetual maladies of modern society and of human nature itself. Whitney demonstrates that scientism is intellectually impoverishing and politically dangerous.

William of Ockham, the most prestigious philosopher of the fourteenth century, was a late Scholastic thinker who is regarded as the founder of Nominalism – the school of thought that denies that universals have any reality apart from the individual things signified by the universal or general term. Ockham’s Summa Logicae was intended as a basic text in philosophy, but its originality and scope encompass his whole system of philosophy. Yet the paucity of English translations and the structural complexity of the Latin have made the Summa, until now, almost completely inaccessible.

In this work Ockham proposes a theory of simple predication, which he then uses inexplicating the truth conditions of progressively more complicated kinds of propositions. His discussion includes what he takes to be the correct semantic treatment of quantified propositions, past tense and future tense propositions, and modal propositions, all of which are receiving much attention from contemporary philosophers. He also illustrates the use of exponential analysis to deal with propositions that prove troublesome in both semantic theory and other disciplines, such as metaphysics, physics, and theology. This type of analysis plays an essential role in his substantive philosophical and theological works, and in many cases then can hardly be understood without a prior acquaintance with this section of the Summa.

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. 

In 1972, Karol Wojtyla, then Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow but still teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin, began work on a book on the conception and methodology of ethics that he intended to write together with his former student Tadeusz Stycze?. Although the manuscript served as the basis for further discussion between Wojty?a and his colleagues, the work remained unfinished when, in 1978, Wojtyla was elected Bishop of Rome. In 1991, Fr Stycze? decided, with the approval of Pope John Paul II, to publish the manuscript in book form. Although an Italian translation appeared in 2002, the book is appearing now for the first time in English translation.

The first booklength study of the Cartesian theory of visual perception, which concludes that Descartes ultimately failed to provide a completely mechanistic theory of visual perception.

Readers will come away from this book with a deeper understanding of the origins of social justice, a sensitivity to the frequent abuses of the term, and a recognition of the forms in which it can be a valuable part of today’s political discourse.

On the publication of the first volume of The Decline and Fall in 1776, there arose a controversy that rapidly became broader than a dispute about an individual writer. Gibbon replied to his critics in the rhetorically brilliant Vindication in 1779, and then withdrew from the fray. But the debate continued long after that. Gibbon’s adversaries were more substantial figures than he was willing to concede, and it is Gibbon’s account of the dispute that has for the most part conditioned the work of later commentators. This comprehensive selection from the writings of Gibbon’s adversaries allows the reader to judge the critics for themselves, and so enter into one of the most important literary disputes of the eighteenth century.

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.

Discusses analytically all the important thinkers and publicists who were active at the time of the great revolution. Zagorin gives particular emphasis to the period 1645–60, when Hobbes, the Leveller leaders, and Winstanley were active. The book also restores to attention other writers who, although influential at the time, have seen been neglected and relates the motives of these men to the underlying causes of the age.

Providing an essential overview of all the main tenets of ancient Greek philosophy in one compact but comprehensive source, Zeller concentrates on four main periods of thought from before Socrates until the end of the Roman Empire. Clearly written and constructed, it includes a full bibliography and is indexed by name. First published in 1883, this classic historical work stood as the leading authority on the subject for many years and remains a useful and valuable guide. This reprints the fully revised thirteenth edition of 1931.