Philosophy
Abolition of Man
In the classic The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century, sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society. Both astonishing and prophetic, The Abolition of Man is one of the most debated of Lewis's extraordinary works. National Review chose it as number seven on their "100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century."
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Absolute Relativism
"I don't want to impose my beliefs on others."
And thus the Dictator of Relativism speaks as he has always spoken to seduce humanity into a false sense of freedom.
Pope Benedict XVI, Christ's personally chosen defender of the Truth is fighting back. He recognized this in his homily on April 18, 2005, "We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires."
Through a down-to-earth, easily accessible Question-and-Answer format, Stefanick's book shows:
Why relativism inherently contradicts its own claims.
What makes it one of the worst ideas in the history of ideas.
How relativism has a direct influence on the morals and virtues of a nation.
Why relativism doesn't even work "in real life."
How relativism is counterproductive to the true practice of tolerance
Why religion which makes claims to absolute truth is finally more tolerant than relativism.
What Christianity has almost singlehandedly done to foster true tolerance in the world.
How all laws legislate morality
What the true meaning of "open-minded" means it's not what you think!
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Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins' Case Against God
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Art of Living
A book of everyday ethics by a man whom Pope St. John Paul II called "one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century," The Art of Living is Dietrich von Hildebrand's essential guide to the moral life.
In just over one hundred pages, Dietrich von Hildebrand, with his wife Alice, presents a distinctive view of the virtuous life that begins with reverence, "the mother of all virtues," and includes chapters on "Faithfulness," "Goodness," "Hope," "The Human Heart," and many others.
The essays that make up this book began as a popular series of radio lectures in 1930s Germany, and their conversational tone comes through in this new edition, which maintains Alice von Hildebrand's original translation, and updates this beloved work for a new generation of readers.
The Art of Living promises to provide clarity, hope, and fresh insights for those seeking to live life more fully, faithfully, and beautifully.
Editorial Reviews
"The author is true to his title. Hildebrand writes about virtue with an artist's flair. He shows us the moral life as it is -- and so we can see the overwhelming appeal of every virtue, every value. It is the art of living virtuously that makes love possible and leads us to friendship and communion - with God and neighbor. A better life, the life we want, begins in these luminous pages."
-- Scott Hahn, bestselling author of over forty titles, including The Lamb's Supper and Reasons to Believe.
"The essays in Dietrich von Hildebrand's The Art of Living are a sublime treasury, filled with light and truth. Whoever longs to live fully and truly will do well to discover and cherish this golden book."
-- Eric Metaxas, New York Times Bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
"The primacy of moral virtue has never had a more passionate, insightful--and bracing-- champion in the modern era than Dietrich von Hildebrand. Men and women of all faiths should celebrate the reissue of this inspired volume."
-- Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, Senior Director, The Tikvah Fund
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Atonement and the Death of Christ: An Exegetical, Historical, and Philosophical Exploration
Through his death on the cross, Christ atoned for sin and so reconciled people to God. New Testament authors drew upon a range of metaphors and motifs to describe this salvific act, and down through history Christian thinkers have tried to articulate various theories to explain the atonement. While Christ's sacrifice serves as a central tenet of the Christian faith, the mechanism of atonement--exactly how Christ effects our salvation--remains controversial and ambiguous to many Christians.
In Atonement and the Death of Christ, William Lane Craig conducts an interdisciplinary investigation of this crucial Christian doctrine, drawing upon Old and New Testament studies, historical theology, and analytic philosophy. The study unfolds in three discrete parts: Craig first explores the biblical basis of atonement and unfolds the wide variety of motifs used to characterize this doctrine. Craig then highlights some of the principal alternative theories of the atonement offered by great Christian thinkers of the premodern era. Lastly, Craig's exploration delves into a constructive and innovative engagement with philosophy of law, which allows an understanding of atonement that moves beyond mystery and into the coherent mechanism of penal substitution.
Along the way, Craig enters into conversation with contemporary systematic theories of atonement as he seeks to establish a position that is scripturally faithful and philosophically sound. The result is a multifaceted perspective that upholds the suffering of Christ as a substitutionary, representational, and redemptive act that satisfies divine justice. In addition, this carefully reasoned approach addresses the rich tapestry of Old Testament imagery upon which the first Christians drew to explain how the sinless Christ saved his people from the guilt of their sins.
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Best Things in Life: A Contemporary Socrates Looks at Power, Pleasure, Truth
What are the best things in life?
Questions like that may boggle your mind. But they don't boggle Socrates. The indomitable old Greek brings his unending questions to Desperate State University. With him come the same mind-opening and spirit-stretching challenge that disrupted ancient Athens.
In twelve short, Socratic dialogues Peter Kreeft explodes contemporary values like success, power and pleasure. And he bursts the modern bubbles of agnosticism and subjectivism. He leaves you richer, wiser and more able to discern what the best things in life actually are.
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City of God
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Drama of Atheist Humanism
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End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History
This is a work of rare prophetic brilliance by Josef Pieper, one of this century's most profound and lucid expositors of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. This book was written to throw light on an ancient question that has vexed and tormented many. What is the nature of "The End" toward which, even now, the world and men are moving? No writer of our time is better equipped to answer that question than Pieper. He provides the most rigorous and sustained philosophical analysis, anchored to "the primeval rock of theological pronouncement," in order precisely to understand the finalities of time and history.
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Essential Writings
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Eternity in the Midst of Time
Can time be our friend? At first glance the question seems ridiculous, because the apparent scarcity of time is a constant source of stress in our busy lives. There are not enough hours in the day, we say as we collapse late at night. Deep down we know that we cannot go on like this.
Father Stinnisen's book dares us to see time with new eyes. The insight that eternity is written in the depths of our hearts helps us to live in time in a way that leads us deeper into God's joy. We are like children in a land of fairy tales where everything is exciting and exploration never ends.We therefore should rejoice that everything around us is great and mysterious and that we can live in eternal wonder.
His intention is not to explain what time is and thus take away its mystery. Instead, his aim is to show us how to see time from different perspectives and to discover how rich and multifaceted it is. Above all, he demonstrates how we can make use of the tremendous possibilities that time offers to us.
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Evidential Power of Beauty
This book relates these developments to nature, music, academe and our unquenchable human thirst for unending beauty, truth and ecstasy, a thirst quenched only at the summit of contemplative prayer here below, and in the consummation of the beatific vision hereafter.
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Finding Happiness in a Complex World: Rules from Aristotle and Aquinas
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.
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Five Proofs of the Existence of God
This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist.
It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes--unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth--showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.
This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past-- thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others-- that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.
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Gods of Atheism
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How Now Shall We Live
Christianity is more than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is also a worldview that not only answers life's basic questions--Where did we come from, and who are we? What has gone wrong with the world? What can we do to fix it?--but also shows us how we should live as a result of those answers. How Now Shall We Live? gives Christians the understanding, the confidence, and the tools to confront the world's bankrupt worldviews and to restore and redeem every aspect of contemporary culture: family, education, ethics, work, law, politics, science, art, music. This book will change every Christian who reads it. It will change the church in the new millennium.
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In Defense of Nature: The Catholic Unity of Environmental, Economic, and Moral Ecology
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Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and medieval Europeans, understood the great value and importance of leisure. He also points out that religion can be born only in leisure -- a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.
Pieper maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture -- and ourselves.
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Mystery of Divine Love
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Nature of Love
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Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy
The Politics of Heaven and Hell makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of classical, medieval, and modern political philosophy, while explaining the profound problem with modernity.
Christianity freed men from the overwhelming burden of ever thinking that their salvation will ultimately come from the political order, writes Fr. James Schall, S.J. Modernity, on the other hand, is a perversion of Christianity, which tries to achieve man's salvation in this world. It does this by politicizing everything, which results in the absolute state: The distance from the City of God to the Leviathan is not at all far once the City of God is relocated on earth.
The best defense against this tyranny is the adequate description of the highest things, of what is beyond politics. Both reason and revelation are needed for this work, and they are eloquently and ably set forth in this book.
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Real Philosophy for Real People: Tools for Truthful Living
A great philosopher once observed, "Philosophers let theories get in the way of what they and everybody else know." A lot of ink has been spilt in order to obscure what we really can't not know about reality, humanity and morality.
In the midst of a culture permeated by philosophies that seek to redefine the universally available meaning of what it is to be human, Fr. Robert McTeigue says it is more important than ever to be equipped with reliable philosophical tools that help us to see clearly the implications of our stated moral claims; that enable us to detect moral and logical error; and that keep us grounded in the love of truth.
You will find such tools in these pages that explore what it means to be human with metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical dimensions.But this book does more than offer tools for seeing and understanding. It is a refutation of philosophies which prize love of theory over love of truth; a rebuke of any metaphysics that cannot account for itself; a refutation of anthropologies which are unworthy of the human person; and a refutation of ethical systems which reduce the great dignity and destiny of the human person.
Most importantly, this book is a prescription for an alternative: it is a real philosophy for real people, wherein the best of classical philosophy finds its fulfillment, expressed in a contemporary idiom that is accessible to the layman and plausible to the scholar. It offers a catalog of errors with their refutations, and a map for living a truly human life. It is a portable error-detector, while providing a basis for knowing and presenting the truth.
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Refutation of Moral Relativism
In his typical unique writing style, Peter Kreeft lets an attractive, honest, and funny relativist interview a "Muslim fundamentalist" absolutist so as not to stack the dice personally for absolutism. In an engaging series of personal interviews, every conceivable argument the "sassy Black feminist" reporter Libby gives against absolutism is simply and clearly refuted, and none of the many arguments for moral absolutism is refuted.
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Rethinking the Enlightenment: Faith in the Age of Reason
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Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Chri
What would happen if Socrates--yes, the Socrates of ancient Athens--suddenly showed up on the campus of a major university and enrolled in its divinity school? What would he think of human progress since his day? How would he react to our values? To our culture? And what would he think of Jesus? Peter Kreeft, Christian philosopher and longtime admirer of the historic Socrates, imagines the result. In this drama Socrates meets such fellow students as Bertha Broadmind, Thomas Keptic and Molly Mooney. Throughout, Kreeft weaves an intriguing web as he brings Socrates closer and closer to a meeting with Jesus. Here is a startling and provocative portrayal of reason in search of truth. In a new introduction to this revised edition, Kreeft also highlights the inspiration for this book and the key questions of truth and faith it addresses.
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Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason
Since the early twentieth century, scientific materialism has so undermined our belief in the human capacity for transcendence that many people find it difficult to believe in God and the human soul. The materialist perspective has not only cast its spell on the natural sciences, psychology, philosophy, and literature, it has also enthralled popular culture, which offers very little to encourage the "soul's upward yearning".
There are many signs of the widespread loss of confidence in our ability to soar upward, and these have been noted by thinkers as diverse as Carl Jung (psychiatrist), Mircea Eliade (historian of religion), Gabriel Marcel (philosopher), and authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Their observations were validated by a 2004 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry that linked the absence of religion with a marked increase in suicide, meaninglessness, substance abuse, separation from family members, and other psychological problems. Thus, the loss of transcendence is negatively affecting an entire society. It is stealing from countless individuals their sense of happiness, dignity, ideals, virtues, and destiny.Ironically, the evidence for transcendence is greater today than in any other period in history. The problem is, this evidence has not been compiled and made widely available--a challenge Father Spitzer aspires to meet with this book. Father Spitzer's work provides a bright light in the midst of the darkness by presenting traditional and contemporary evidence for God and a transphysical soul from several major sources. It shows that we are transcendent beings with souls capable of surviving bodily death; that we are self-reflective beings aware of and able to strive toward perfect truth, love, goodness, and beauty; that we have the dignity of being created in the very image of God. If we underestimate these truths, we undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny.- Please log in to review this product
Student's Guide to Liberal Learning
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The Greatest Philosopher Who Ever Lived
In 2019, Peter Kreeft published Socrates' Children, a four-volume series on the hundred greatest philosophers of all time, spanning from ancient Greece to contemporary Germany. But he made a terrible mistake: he somehow left out women, and with this, he overlooked the greatest mind of them all.
He forgot her—a mysterious housewife from a desert village—because he had forgotten what "philosophy" means. "Philosophy is not the cultivation of cleverness," Kreeft explains, "or the sophistications of scholarship, or the analysis of analysis, or the refutation of refutations, or the deconstruction of deconstructions." No, "philosophy is a romance, a love affair—the love of wisdom."
This book is a one-of-a-kind study on Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus. If Jesus Christ is wisdom incarnate, and if Mary loved Him more than anyone else ever did, then it holds that Mary is the greatest philosopher, the greatest wisdom-lover. With precision and humor, Kreeft not only unpacks the thought and spirit of Mary as we know her through Scripture and Church doctrine, but offers a heartfelt crash course in the basics of philosophy—methodology, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, cosmology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and more—all through the lens of the Mother of God.
Fans of Kreeft will find here another fine example of his characteristic freshness, creativity, depth, and readability. But above all, those who are curious about the mother of Jesus, whether they are new to Christian faith or simply hoping to discover it anew, will likely find themselves swept up in the tide of Mary's wise love for God.
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Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes - Life as Vanity, Job - Life as Suffering, Song of Songs - Life as Love
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Transformation in Christ
A magnificent treatise by a distinguished philosopher on the pursuit of spiritual perfection.
ùPublishers Weekly
ùArchbishop Fulton Sheen
A masterpiece of modern spirituality: eminently practical and highly recommended.
ùFr. John Hardon, S.J.
A solid and penetrating analysis of the Christian virtues, and their application in the struggle toward Christian perfection.
ùLibrary Journal
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Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith
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Walking Through Twilight: A Wife's Illness--A Philosopher's Lament
How do you continue to find God as dementia pulls your loved one into the darkness? Nothing is simple for a person suffering from dementia, and for those they love. When ordinary tasks of communication, such as using a phone, become complex, then difficult, and then impossible, isolation becomes inevitable. Helping becomes excruciating. In these pages philosopher Douglas Groothuis offers a window into his experience of caring for his wife as a rare form of dementia ravages her once-brilliant mind and eliminates her once-stellar verbal acuity. Mixing personal narrative with spiritual insight, he captures moments of lament as well as philosophical and theological reflection. Brief interludes provide poignant pictures of life inside the Groothuis household, and we meet a parade of caregivers, including a very skilled companion dog. Losses for both Doug and Becky come daily, and his questions for God multiply as he navigates the descending darkness. Here is a frank exploration of how one continues to find God in the twilight.
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