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Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine’s Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces—with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum. There’s the comic: “Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word.” There’s the sentimental: “Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden.” There’s the reminiscent: “Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea.” Along the way, there’s the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical. “Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art,” he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. “Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols,” he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays and short stories gathered in one place—in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine’s Press—is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world.

DKK 203.00
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Spending the Winter – A Poetry Collection - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Spending the Winter – A Poetry Collection - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The poetry of Spending the Winter is musical and structured, whimsical and piercing, begging to be read aloud when one is not laughing or arrested by an image that hooks the heart. “Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading,” writes one poet. “A throwback to a time when lovers of poetry…looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin,” adds another. With sections of comedy that show his wit, translations that echo his vast reading, and formalist poetry that reveal his craft, Bottum aims, in the way few poets these days do, at memorable lines and heart-stopping images as he seeks the deep stuff of human experience: God and birth and death—the beautiful and terrifying finitude of life. “We do with words what little words can do,” he writes. But in Spending the Winter, Joseph Bottum shows that words can do far more than a little. “Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading. . . . If you’re a reader who loves poetry whatever mood it’s in, just open Spending the Winter anywhere to find poems that hurt, enlighten, and delight.” —Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Rehearsing Absence and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize “Joseph Bottum is a brilliant formalist, and to read him is to enter the world of the tried-and-true classics, all achieved with an amazingly contemporary ring. His Spending the Winter is a delight. Here is a poetry of elegy, humor, wit, political savvy, and vast learning.” —Paul Mariani, author The Great Wheel and winner of the John Ciardi Award “Joseph Bottum’s Spending the Winter is a throwback to a time when lovers of poetry outside the literary establishment looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin. This is poetry from another age—an age when we expected intellectual, religious, and literary significance from our verse.” —A.M. Juster, author of Wonder and Wrath and winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize “Spending the Winter is a word-lover’s dream: Joseph Bottum’s poems pierce, probe, dazzle, and delight. They will open the eyes of your soul.” —Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well “When reading Spending the Winter, I recalled C.S. Lewis’s description of joy as a wanting for something that is beyond this world. There’s a sense in these poems that things around us are fleeting, yet for that reason, the poems ask us to pay all the more attention.” —Jessica Hooten Wilson, author of Giving the Devil his Due

DKK 156.00
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The Second Spring - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The Second Spring - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

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

DKK 193.00
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The Decline of the Novel - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The Decline of the Novel - Joseph Bottum - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. “For almost three hundred years,” Bottum writes, “the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world—the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.” But now we no longer “read novels the way we used to.”In a historical tour de force—the kind of sweeping analysis almost lost to contemporary literary criticism—Bottum traces the emergence of the novel from the modern religious crisis of the individual soul and the atomized self. In chapters on such figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Mann, he examines the enormous ambitions once possessed by novels and finds in these older works a rebuke of our current failure of nerve. “We walk with our heads down,” Bottum writes. “Without a sense of the old goals and reasons––a sense of the good achieved, understood as progress––all that remains are the crimes the culture committed in the past to get where it is now. uncompensated by achievement, unexplained by purpose, these unameliorated sins must now seem overwhelming: the very definition of a failed culture.” In readings of everything from genre fiction to children’s books, Bottum finds a lack of faith in the ability of art to respond to the deep problems of existence. “the decline of the novel’s prestige reflects and confirms a genuine cultural crisis,” he writes. Linking the novel to its religious origins, Bottum describes the urgent search for meaning in the new conditions of the modern age: “If the natural world is imagined by modernity as empty of purpose, then the hunt for nature’s importance is supernatural, by definition.” the novel became a fundamental device by which culture pursued the supernatural—facilitated by modernity’s confidence in science and cultural progress. Losing that confidence, Bottum says, we lost the purpose of the art: “the novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”Told in fast-paced, wide-ranging prose, Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel is a succinct critique of classical and contemporary fiction, providing guidelines for navigating the vast genre. this book is a must-read for those who hunger for grand accounts of literature, students of literary form, critics of contemporary art, and general readers who wish to learn, finally, what we all used to know: the deep moral purpose of reading novels.

DKK 241.00
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On Humanity`s Intensive Introspection - Joseph Cropsey - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

On Humanity`s Intensive Introspection - Joseph Cropsey - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The essays and lectures first collected here span a period of over 25 years and cover the greater part of Joseph Cropsey’s illustrious career of scholarship and teaching at the University of Chicago. They are presented in the order in which he wrote them. The central problem of human thought and existence, according to Cropsey, is that it is absolutely impossible for a human being to understand his human condition without understanding his position within the whole of which the human is only a part. Our imperfect knowledge of the whole therefore places limits on our knowledge of ourselves, for we do not know where we stand in relation to the whole that conditions us, and therewith our own condition. What then should we do in the face of our irremediable ignorance and uncertainty? Cropsey argues that the difficulties currently faced by liberalism arise from the efforts of later thinkers to elevate it beyond its Hobbesian origins in self-preservation and natural necessity. As a result of their flights from nature to morality, the sovereignty that for Hobbes protected natural rights decayed into a mere legalism that undermines liberalism’s ability to defend itself. Cropsey explores the tendencies within liberalism toward both self-abnegation and self-assertion as well as the resources in the Western tradition that can help fortify contemporary liberalism. Both Scripture and Plato, for example, insist that our “flights from nature” remain cognizant of human limitation. And the robust strands of modernity, found in the works of Locke and Smith as well as of Hobbes, demonstrate the benefits of a freedom within the limits of nature. In contrasting liberal democracy and Marxism – the version of modern politics that best exemplifies the flight from nature – Cropsey finds that liberal democracy manifests a spirited animus against being ruled by others, and celebrates individual choice, whereas Marxism allows a freedom to will only the rational, as it emerges in history, and aspires to replace the competitiveness of bourgeois life with an affectionate sociability. Cropsey also shows how liberalism’s separation of church and state, which replaces Hobbes’ teaching on sovereignty, serves in fact to protect civil supremacy by limiting religious authority to the private sphere at the same time that it moderates the state by depriving it of any claim to divine support. But he warns against the complacency implied in the thesis that liberal democracy represents the end or culmination of history. Looking further at the resources within the tradition that might strengthen contemporary liberalism, Cropsey challenges not merely orthodoxies of Platonic scholarship, but the very distinction between ancients and moderns, the identification of philosophy with reason, and ultimately the dichotomy between reason and revelation. Cropsey’s equating the meaning of an open society with openness to the activity of philosophy within it might appear to be in tension with Plato’s famous description in the Republic of a closed society ruled by philosopher-kings. But Cropsey shows that in the Timaeus, which provides a cosmological setting for the activity of the Republic’s city, Plato himself questions the intelligibility of the whole. In his analysis of Plato’s Philebus Cropsey emphasizes the disjunction between the finite, intelligible and infinite, unintelligible elements.. The inscrutability of the whole connects philosophy to revelation as well as philosophy’s political activity to an open or liberal society. Crospey’s essays represent experiments in philosophic interpretations of our world, which draw on the political and philosophical thought that has helped to form that world and that help us to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses in light of our essential humanity.

DKK 356.00
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Jokes, Life after Death, and God - Joseph Bobik - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Jokes, Life after Death, and God - Joseph Bobik - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Jokes, Life after Death, and God has two main tasks: to try to understand exactly what a joke is, and to see whether there are any connections between jokes, on the one hand, and life after death and God, on the other hand. But it pursues other tasks as well, tasks of an ancillary sort. This book devises a general and comprehensive, but brief, theory of jokes. The author begins with critiques of other writers’ views on the subject. 1) Ted Cohen thinks that such a theory is impossible. 2) Ronald Berk, on the other hand, provides just such a theory. And 3) John Morreall provides a general theory of laughter, which may include some things which can be used in a general theory of jokes. 4) Neil Schaeffer, too, provides a general theory of laughter, which makes a big point out of what he calls the “ludicrous context”; but he does include a chapter on jokes. 5) Christopher Wilson offers a general theory of jokes in which he focuses on form and content. And 6) Thomas Werge, in reflecting on the comic, suggests a general theory of jokes which identifies their matter, form, agents, purposes, and beyond these, the underlying shared relational context, which makes it possible for jokes to arise. 7) Bill Fuller’s message is that there is more funniness coming out of two or more heads than out of one, just as Socrates’ message was that there is more clarity coming out of two or more heads than out of one. 8) Umberto Eco feels that monks should laugh, just as ordinary people do; for laughter not only refreshes our seeking spirits, it also illuminates the truth we seek. 9) Simon Critchley, in his reflections on humor, notes that jokes bring on a kind of everyday anamnesis, that they are anti-story stories, that they are like prayers, that they are like philosophy; and that they require a certain underlying context, which is implicitly recognized by both teller and listener, and which renders possible the tension needed to make the punch line work. 10) Martha Wolfenstein, pursuing a psychological analysis of children’s humor, proposes that the underlying motive for telling jokes remains the same from childhood to adulthood, i.e., to transform painful and frustrating experiences so as to extract pleasure from them; and that the agent or productive cause of jokes is the repressing unconscious, as suggested by Freud. As John Morreall has argued, neither the Superiority Theory (as in Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes), nor the Relief Theory (as in Spencer and Freud), nor the Incongruity Theory (as in Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard) appears to work as a general and comprehensive theory. Moreover, these writers talk more about humor and laughter than about jokes. To be sure, a joke is a type of humor. Thus, to say something about humor is to say something, though of a generic sort, about jokes. Similarly, to say something about the laughter caused by humor is to say something, though generic, about the laughter caused by jokes. Most of the authors considered in chapter one are concerned with jokes, and not only with humor as such. Section 11 of chapter one puts together, out of the combined contributions of these authors, what can be considered the beginnings of, some thoughts toward, a general and comprehensive theory of jokes. This task the author illustrates in a concrete way, by looking at individual jokes of different sorts; not, however, without inviting the reader to enjoy these jokes. The author looks particularly at Jewish jokes, Christian jokes, and Islamic jokes (jokes in three major religious traditions), jokes about philosophy and philosophers (philosophers ought to be able to laugh at themselves and at what they do), yo mama jokes (out of a healthy curiosity), Italian jokes and Slovak jokes, all of which makes for a clearer understanding of exactly what a joke is. The analysis of general theory is then followed by some views on the morality of jokes and joke-telling, and an analysis of the connection between jokes and life after death, on the one hand, and God, on the other. Throughout the book Bobik offers innumerable examples to heighten our understanding and entertain us.

DKK 381.00
1

An African Perspective on the Thought of Benedict XVI - Stephen Kizito Forbi - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

An African Perspective on the Thought of Benedict XVI - Stephen Kizito Forbi - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

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

DKK 427.00
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Polity and Economy – Further Thoughts Principles Of Adam Smith - Joseph Cropsey - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Polity and Economy – Further Thoughts Principles Of Adam Smith - Joseph Cropsey - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

To perceive Adam Smith's place in the stream of Enlightenment philosophy is to gain an indispensable insight into our own condition as denizens of the liberal capitalist society. Before Smith was the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he was the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The earlier work establishes Smith unmistakably as among those thinkers who aspired to describe the human condition in terms of motivation, of cause and effect, thus in terms of the principles of nature itself, of nature as mechanism, not nature as edifying teleology. Precisely because morality was not to be traced to any homiletic beyond nature or to a volition with nature, the thinkers of the modern order assumed responsibility for locating the ground of true moral virtue within mechanical nature alone. And just as the locating of mankind within a remorseless system of cause and effect could be the reduction of humanity to the status of robotic slavery, it became the self-assigned task of the thinkers in question to demonstrate that the natural order was one not of etiological bondage but of freedom in an elevated sense. The intention of Polity and Economy is to present Adam Smith as author of liberal capitalism, as propounder within an order that converts the natural self-preference of every living thing into an instrument of goodness, prosperity, and freedom - as long as our deployment of natural means does not, in the organization and conduct of society, violate the truths of nature itself. This edition of Polity and Economy revises the original with cross-references from the standard Glasgow editions and adds two further essays not in the original: 'Adam Smith and Political Philosophy' and 'The Invisible Hand: Moral and Political Considerations.'

DKK 156.00
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Veritas Divina – Aquinas On Divine Truth Some Philosophy Of Religion - Joseph Bobik - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Veritas Divina – Aquinas On Divine Truth Some Philosophy Of Religion - Joseph Bobik - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

This book does some philosophy of religion. It takes as its point of departure what Aquinas calls divine truth (veritas divina), i.e. the collection of truths revealed to man by God. And it tries to make as clear as possible what Aquinas says about some of these revealed truths. Then it agrees or disagrees with what he says, as needed, for reasons of various sorts, whether philosophical, theological, scientific, historical, etc. - of whatever sort, just so long as they are relevant and cogent' to do these things as well as possible, if only in a small way - 'pro nostro modulo', as Aquinas puts it, in describing what he intends to do as the author of the 'Summa Contra Gentiles'. Veritas Divina includes not only certain truths which are attainable by natural reason, like truths abouth certain aspects of the virtue of religion, of prayer, of pain and suffering, of friendship, of death; but also certain truths which are not attainable by natural reason, like truths about the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, Purgatory, Heaven, Hell.

DKK 284.00
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Light of Reason, Light of Faith – Joseph Ratzinger and the German Enlightenment - Maurice Ashley Agbaw–ebai - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Light of Reason, Light of Faith – Joseph Ratzinger and the German Enlightenment - Maurice Ashley Agbaw–ebai - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

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.

DKK 429.00
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Who Believes Is Not Alone - Georg Ganswein - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Who Believes Is Not Alone - Georg Ganswein - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The collaboration between a future pope and young prelate is transformed into profound friendship when circumstances thrust Joseph Ratzinger into the Apostolic Palace, even as he expected to be released in retirement to his beloved Bavaria. Monsignor Georg Gänswein never left his side, and witnessed one of the most influential people of this century conduct his papacy on both sides of the curtain. From his appointment as private secretary in 2003, which was meant to be temporary, until the abdication of the pope in 2013 and subsequent years as emeritus, Monsignor Gänswein walked the same steps and weathered the same storms as his dear friend, the Roman Pontiff Benedict XVI. Here he offers the truth regarding the man and the papacy as a spiritual testament of a pope whose formidable legacy is often subject to unfounded characterizations of rigidity and secrecy. Written with the involvement of the regarded Vaticanista Saverio Gaeta, Mons. Gänswein offers an account of a particular decade in history and confronts false claims of intrigue and cover-up (Vatileaks, the Orlandi abduction case, the sexual abuse scandal, among other issues) to tell the real story of a pope who faced a changing landscape and a public who largely misunderstood him and his style of governance. Here we meet one of the most affable and intellectually formidable popes the Catholic Church has ever known, and a priest who might also be considered a prophet of the post-modern age. Gänswein brilliantly contextualizes many of Benedict's most poignant theological positions, and in giving us a sense of their origin reveals that Benedict seamlessly lived everything he promulgated. His faith was the single bulwark upon which his personality as both teacher and leader were built. No biography has yet to establish the integrity and heart of Joseph Ratzinger as well as his friend, Georg Gänswein, does here. As a spiritual testament more than just a journalistic exposé, Gänswein provides something only he can give––namely, the candid intelligence and sanctity witnessed up close. This is a remarkable and singular contribution to the history of the papacy and the record of the life of a saint. As Gänswein asserts, knowing this man is to encounter heroic virtue and an invitation to meet God, the greatest lover of mankind. Pope Benedict's own friendship with God will continue to provide warmth for as long as there are people on this earth who believe.

DKK 225.00
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Beauteous Truth – Faith, Reason, Literature & Culture - Raymond Burke - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Beauteous Truth – Faith, Reason, Literature & Culture - Raymond Burke - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Beauteous Truth explores the inextricable connection between the Good, the True and the Beautiful. It is a book that makes the necessary connections between faith and reason and between theology, philosophy, history and literature. It presents a panoramic overview of Western Civilization, from Homer to Tolkien, and highlights the importance of the great figures of the Catholic cultural revival, including Newman, Wilde, Chesterton, Belloc, and C.S. Lewis. Ranging from Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, Beauteous Truth celebrates the marriage of sanity and sanctity, which is the fruit of the indissoluble union of fides et ratio. Early ReviewsWhat we have here is a glorious and compendious portmanteau of – well – of Everything, as it were. We have all long since discovered that Joseph Pearce is a polymath. But he has outdone himself with this volume. The subtitle is the cue: “Faith, Reason, Literature, and Culture.” And the text fulfills that promise. Readers are in for a bracing itinerary that will take them from Greek classicism through the Middle Ages, the Counter-Reformation, the Romantic Movement, and into modernity. The presiding factor in the whole thing is a robust Catholic orthodoxy. The author/guide speaks with both authority and brio. This book qualifies for the “Highly recommended” slot. – Thomas Howard (St. John’s Seminary, Boston, emer.)Joseph Pearce has not only written much on Catholic letters but on the whole tradition of letters in our culture. In this collection, he brings together his wide, amazingly wide reflections and considerations on literature and what it really stands for. While many paths to the highest things might be taken, the literary path is perhaps the most pleasant and the most engaging. Pearce not only draws us out, alerts us to authors who speak to us, but he also opens doors to writers and themes in Catholic and western literature that would be otherwise closed to us without his sensitive guidance and insight. We have here the whole of Pearce where he tells us everything about which he has been thinking. It is a great contribution to our understanding of reality, to the things that are.” – James V. Schall, s.j., Georgetown UniversityThis interdisciplinary collection of essays previously published in such journals as St. Austin Review, First Things, and Chesterton Review provides rich food for thought on an array of topics dealing with the intersection between beauty, truth, culture, and Catholicism. Brief yet pithy, each essay can stand alone, inviting wide ranging meditation on the modern situation in light of history, literature, science, and religion. Taken together, the essays offer an epic sweep of a culture at crossroads urgently needing to reclaim the illumination of Christ. This is a book to savor and return to, time and again. – Dr. Mary Reichardt, Professor of Catholic Studies and Literature, The University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn.

DKK 264.00
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O Rare Ralph McInerny – Stories and Reflections on a Legendary Notre Dame Professor - Christopher Kaczor - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

O Rare Ralph McInerny – Stories and Reflections on a Legendary Notre Dame Professor - Christopher Kaczor - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

During more than a half century at the University of Notre Dame, Dr. Ralph McInerny’s legendary achievements include writing more than 50 non-fiction books in philosophy, medieval studies, and theology, as well as more than 90 novels, including the Father Dowling Murder Mystery series. This volume offers personal reflections on the man himself and what he meant to so many over his rich life of teaching, writing, and contributing to the life of the mind. Alasdair MacIntyre, Cardinal Francis George, Ralph’s brother D.Q. McInerny, Michael Novak, John Haldane, Joseph Bottum, Thomas De Konick, Jude P. Dougherty, Gerard V. Bradley, Fr. Marvin O’Connell, and many others (see below) aim to capture some of the ‘more’ that was McInerny, a more that cannot be captured by any curriculum vitae, even one as impressive as Ralph’s. The stories, anecdotes, and reflections in this volume give us various snapshots of the man that cannot be found in news accounts, press releases, or academic evaluations. A person as great as Ralph should not live merely in memory, so some record such as this volume written his friends, colleagues, and former students becomes appropriate. Also included is a full list of all the books – fiction and non-fiction – authored by McInerny as well as enumeration of his forty-eight doctoral students and their dissertations completed under his direction. Finally, the collection is rounded out by five contributions by McInerny himself: a poem about his late wife Connie, a scholarly article “Why I Am a Thomist,” a popular essay, “Mementoes Never Die,” an early Roger Knight mystery entitled “Dust Abhors a Vacuum,” as well as his last written words.

DKK 185.00
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Where Were We? – The Conversation Continues - Frederic Raphael - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Where Were We? – The Conversation Continues - Frederic Raphael - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

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.

DKK 300.00
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The Heart – An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectation - John Haldane - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The Heart – An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectation - John Haldane - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

This new edition of The Heart (out of print for nearly 30 years) is the flagship volume in a series of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s works to be published by St. Augustine’s Press in collaboration with the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project. Founded in 2004, the Legacy Project exists in the first place to translate the many German writings of von Hildebrand into English. While many revere von Hildebrand as a religious author, few realize that he was a philosopher of great stature and importance. Those who knew von Hildebrand as philosopher held him in the highest esteem. Louis Bouyer, for example, once said that “von Hildebrand was the most important Catholic philosopher in Europe between the two world wars.” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger expressed even greater esteem when he said: “I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.”The Heart is an accessible yet important philosophical contribution to the understanding of the human person. In this work von Hildebrand is concerned with rehabilitating the affective life of the human person. He thinks that for too long philosophers have held it in suspicion and thought of it as embedded in the body and hence as being much inferior to intellect and will. In reality, he argues, the heart, the center of affectivity, has many different levels, including an eminently personal level; at this level affectivity is just as important a form of personal life as intellect and will. Von Hildebrand develops the idea that properly personal affectivity, far than tending away from an objective relation to being, is in fact one major way in which we transcend ourselves and give being its due. Von Hildebrand also developed the important idea that the heart “in many respects is more the real self of the person than his intellect or will.”At the same time, the author shows full realism about the possible deformities of affective life; he offers rich analyses of what he calls affective atrophy and affective hypertrophy. The second half of The Heart offers a remarkable analysis of the affectivity of the God-Man.

DKK 193.00
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Death Comes for the War Poets – A Verse Tapestry - Joseh Pearce - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

Death Comes for the War Poets – A Verse Tapestry - Joseh Pearce - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

On the centenary of the United States’ entry into World War One, Death Comes for the War Poets grapples with the full horror of trench warfare as experienced by the two greatest war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It does so through the eyes of the poets themselves but also through the eyes of the Spirit of Death. How does a human soul cope with the horror of war? Is there room for hope? And what of the Spirit of Death, ever present in times of war and peace? Can Death itself be changed? These questions are at the suffering heart of this powerful verse drama. Joseph Pearce wove this rich tapestry from the poetry of some of the finest Christian voices of the modern era: Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, as well as Owen and Sassoon. He was inspired to do so to commemorate the centenary of World War One and also to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death and the sixtieth anniversary of the reception into the Church of the great literary convert, Siegfried Sassoon. The verse drama tells the story of Sassoon’s journey from the horrors of trench warfare to his final acceptance and embrace of Christ and His Church. It shows how the Church allowed this great writer to make sense of his own life and to make sense of life itself – and indeed of death itself, the latter of which only makes sense in the light of Christ. It is, therefore, the story of two conversions; the conversion of the poet but also the conversion of Death. Death Comes for the War Poets grapples with the evil of war, expressing its horrors in the words of the two greatest war poets. It grapples with the problem of suffering and the enigma that the presence of death presents. It asks the deepest questions about life and death which we, as human beings, cannot avoid contemplating. Ultimately it doesn’t simply ask these most important and painful of questions, it offers answers Throughout the history of Christian civilization, the greatest works of art and literature have presented a memento mori to the people of Christendom. This reminder of death points to the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Death Comes for the War Poets follows this noble tradition by having the figure of Death as one of the characters who interacts with the two soldier-poets. Those reading this drama will see the face of Death through the eyes of these poets and will come to understand the reality of death and the beauty of life in a new evangelized light. They will be dragged into the trenches with the suffering troops, will see the ugliness of death, and will emerge into the light of the Life that defeats death and makes sense of it. They will in some way experience the healing experience of conversion as the drama unfolds from the shadow of death into the full light of Christ.

DKK 193.00
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The Concept of Social Justice - Christopher Wolfe - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

The Concept of Social Justice - Christopher Wolfe - Bog - St Augustine's Press - Plusbog.dk

“Social justice” is a term heard a great deal today, but what does it mean? It does not appear in pre-nineteenth century classic texts on justice. Is it a social agenda inspired by compassion? Is it a particular set of institutional arrangements to achieve justice? What the term means, and – in some quarters – whether it is even a term worth using, is a matter of controversy. The inspiration for this book comes from the fact that current discussions of “social justice” often deal overwhelmingly with programs that aim to advance certain specific and controversial policies to deal with various social problems. In the process, important theoretical questions about social justice are not even confronted, much less resolved. For example, what does the word “social” add to “justice”? Isn't all justice “social”? What is the relation between “social justice” and more classical Aristotelian terms such as “distributive justice,” “commutative justice,” and “legal justice”? With respect to its current usage, is the term “social justice” applicable only to special policies or programs (e.g., government or nonprofit social welfare programs)? Does it apply only to the provision of material goods and services? Does it play a role in the ordinary everyday world of business and work? The papers in this book aim, not at identifying some particular set of public policies that allegedly constitute the right content of “social justice,” but at reflection on the meaning of social justice. It is not an exhortation to pursue policies that are “understood,” without discussion, to be the right way to pursue social justice. It is not aimed at stimulating activism, mobilizing people to go out and achieve social justice now. Rather, it aims at building the foundation upon which people can identify general principles of justice, and make reasonable prudential judgments about how to pursue social justice. This theoretical orientation means that it is neither “right-wing” nor “left-wing.” The Concept of Social Justice provides a range of insightful essays on the term and on its various uses and abuses. The authors of these papers are committed to something like “social justice” – they don't believe that it is spurious notion that should be rejected. They may very well disagree about exactly how to pursue social justice. But their primary concern here is to ask, simply, “what is social justice?” Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Novak show various ways in which the term has been misunderstood or narrowed or abused for ideological reasons. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s essay makes careful distinctions necessary to identify the implications of adding “social” to “justice” and fleshes out a valuable notion of the concept. John Finnis locates the origins of social justice in an historical misreading of Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of justice, which narrowed his “general justice” in a way that required a new notion of “social justice.” Joseph Koterksi, S.J., Robert Kennedy, and J. Brian Benestad each elaborate some of the ways in which “social justice” has been used in the Catholic social teaching since Rerum Novarum and in international theological and U.S. episcopal documents. 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.

DKK 185.00
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