St. Thomas Aquinas

Are we truly striving for heaven or merely avoiding hell?

The human heart's greatest longing is to see God as He is. And yet, many people simply want to escape hell's pain, or even worse, they follow our disordered fallen nature in choosing sinful pleasures. Our Lord said the road to heaven is narrow, but the road to hell is wide (see Matt. 7:13). Is choosing the road to heaven merely wanting to avoid pain, or is it actively pursuing the greatest good beyond imagining?

Do we choose the good because we strive to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, or do we choose the good merely because we fear hell?

God never leaves us alone in these choices. Indeed, He sends us His grace, but--to help us cooperate with that grace and fight valiantly--He also sends spiritual warriors and guides, of whom one of the greatest is Saint Thomas Aquinas.

In Angelic Virtues and Demonic Vices, Saint Thomas guides us on how to pursue our true celestial homeland while avoiding running to a false heaven. He outlines the various vices, and their forty-plus daughters, and details how to conquer them.

After reading this work, you will not only desire to become a saint because you will see how hideous vice truly is but also see how splendid and virtuous living for God is.

The essentials of the Catholic Faith--
clearly & beautifully explained by one of the Church's greatest thinkers!

Although St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the Church's most intellectually powerful theologians, few know that he also wrote a great deal that's well within the reach of ordinary believers.

In fact, as you'll find in The Aquinas Catechism, St. Thomas had a remarkable ability to communicate the Faith -- including both its most complex and its simplest elements -- in plain language. Here you'll find his deeply insightful, straightforward, and clear explanations of the Apostles' Creed, the Commandments, and the Sacraments -- as well as of the Our Father and the Hail Mary.

In other words, this book will give you a basic course in the Catholic Faith, taught by the Church's greatest theologian.

Let him help you:

Gain a better grasp of Church doctrine

Pray with greater fervor and understanding

Receive the Sacraments more worthily

Learn what God requires of you and why

Explain Church teachings to non-Catholic friends

Discover the scriptural sources of our Catholic Faith

Find remedies for moral weaknesses that still afflict you

Glimpse the greatness of the Church's supernatural mission

And much more!

Above all, let St. Thomas teach you how to explain, defend, and live your Faith . . . with the clear-sighted wisdom of a saint!

Why, since happiness is so universally sought after, are so many people so miserable? The answer can be found by unpacking the wisdom of two of history's intellectual giants who set out to answer the question that has confounded man from time immemorial: What makes us happy?

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas existed sixteen centuries apart, yet each reached similar understandings about what makes a person happy and what makes him miserable. In these enlightening pages, Dr. Charles Nemeth synthesizes the judgments of history's two greatest thinkers to present for you a life plan that inevitably leads to a happy human existence, whatever your ethnicity, religion, or citizenship.

You will explore what it means to be happy and will come to understand the limitations of happiness. You'll learn how to live in accordance with your basic nature so that your inclinations will not conflict with that which makes you flourish. And you'll calibrate your compass so that you will be able to navigate your way into a state of life that makes you truly happy.

Moreover, you'll discover why happiness is obtained through action and not mere desire and why wealth and fame do not - and cannot - buy happiness. You'll also learn why the body, despite providing avenues for sensory and intellectual pleasure, is incapable of providing true happiness.

Strikingly, none of the suggestions in this book have ever been shown to be flawed. These timeless recommendations for a happy life never go out of favor and never change. Instead, they remain a constant, permanent, universal set of criteria on how to achieve a happy existence.

You'll also learn:

The benefits of moderation, sensibility, and equilibrium

The source of ultimate happiness and the means to attain it

The formula for fostering contentment - what to strive for and what to avoid

The essence of true goodness, happiness, and beauty

Human excellence and different levels of happiness

With this Rosetta stone of a book, you will find solutions to fortify your soul and bring you peace. You will be equipped with a new sense of direction, hope, and healing that will guide you closer to lasting happiness.

A shortened version of Kreeft's much larger Summa of the Summa, which in turn was a shortened version of the Summa Theologica. The reason for the double shortening is pretty obvious: the original runs some 4000 pages! (The Summa of the Summa was just over 500.) The Summa is certainly the greatest, most ambitious, most rational book of theology ever written. In it, there is also much philosophy, which is selected, excerpted, arranged, introduced, and explained in footnotes here by Kreeft, a popular Thomist teacher and writer. St. Thomas Aquinas is universally recognized as one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. His writings combine the two fundamental ideals of philosophical writing: clarity and profundity. He is a master of metaphysics and technical terminology, yet so full of both theoretical and practical wisdom. He is the master of common sense. The Summa Theologica is timeless, but particularly important today because of his synthesis of faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, and the Biblical and the classical Greco-Roman heritages. This little book is designed for beginners, either for classroom use or individually. It contains the most famous and influential passages of St. Thomas' philosophy with copious aids to understanding them.

Creating a summary of all human knowledge may not be the sort of undertaking we begin in the twenty-first century, but there is still room on our bookshelves for a classic--Summa Theologica, one of the world's oldest and greatest masterpieces. St. Thomas Aquinas has much to teach us--most especially how to confront the classic questions that are still with us after centuries of thought.