Latest Book Releases

Following after brilliant authoritarian Pope Pius XII and good-humored Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI seemed hesitant, anxious, even tormented. Yet the impact of his fifteen-year-long papacy was colossal: not a single aspect of Church life was left untouched in the whirlwind of change unleashed by the Ecumenical Council he guided and sought to implement. Who was this man, Giovanni Battista Montini (1897-1978), who so altered the face, the voice, the bearing of Catholicism? Versatile historian ...

Poems by David Craig "This is a book of joy, an Easter of jubilation. Holiness infuses these poems: holy flights of imagination, holy laughter, holy living in the everyday, and holy resurrection hope. Even the punishing season of winter is 'a glass of chilled champagne.' And angels everywhere-materializing to sing a Bach mass in the middle of the night on an empty street, or maybe dropping in for a summer swim. The energy, the down-to-earth reverence-is all of a piece, creating an abundance o...

Identity means being the same and being different. It is a one-word oxymoron. How on earth can the concept make sense? This brilliant exposition of the question goes-by way of literature, philosophy, and psychology-to show that it can only be answered metaphysically. Identity is the mystery at the heart of creation, and, ultimately, the mystery of its Creator. Personal anxieties about who we are and political tensions about who others are melt before the radiance of God's truth. In that truth...

The Ancient Art of Memory Meets the Timeless Art of Living Memorize the Stoics! The Ancient Art of Memory Meets the Timeless Art of Living. The title says it all! Extolling the powers of God-given human reason, Stoic philosophers such as Roman knight Musonius Rufus and his student, the former slave, Epictetus, developed powerful practical lessons for living tranquil, virtuous, loving lives. These lessons were praised by such early Church Fathers as Justin Martyr and Origen. Epictetus's Handbo...

A Primer on Ascetical Theology Do you want to dive deeper in your relationship with Jesus Christ? Are you looking for the deep springs of our spiritual nature? Do you suspect that you're missing the fuller picture of our supernatural life? If so, Glory Unto Glory: A Primer on Ascetical Theology was written for you. Most such books today limit themselves to the practice of prayer or a broad introduction to the spiritual life. Some address moral truth. But few, if any, situate all these aspects...

The Autobiography of a Latin Mass Exile Fr Bryan Houghton's life was fraught with momentous transitions. As a Protestant child educated in a Catholic school, he gradually awakened to the truth of the Faith and eventually converted. He responded to the call to priesthood, which he understood in its traditional sense as an office of offering sacrifice, reconciling sinners, feeding the spiritually hungry, and preaching divinely revealed truths. When the Second Vatican Council hit, and even more ...

In the years since his graduation from St. Marquis University, Blake Yourrick has fled his family and Milwaukee, rotating from job to dead-end job-working the Bakken oilfields in Dakota and even signing on as the night caretaker of a rural abbey graveyard. Deep in student debt and estranged from his misanthropic, alcoholic father, Blake is haunted by the memory of his mother's death-and by his relationship with his college mentor, a defrocked priest named Theo Hape, who is known for his adven...

A Brief History of Catholic Traditionalism in the United States, from Triumph to Traditionis Custodes In this compact and informative book, Stuart Chessman tells the tale of the traditionalist movement in the United States of America, from its birth in the era of Triumph (1965-1975) to the mounting tensions with "conservative Catholicism" (1975-1985), to the dawning of hope in the "Indult regime" (1985-2007), leading into the broad daylight of Summorum Pontificum (2007-2021), and then descend...

Navigating the Spiritual Life with Blessed Columba Marmion In the early twentieth century, Blessed Columba Marmion's dogmatically-grounded spiritual theology, expressed in artful prose, set the Catholic world on fire. A century later, in The Grace of "Nothingness," Fr Cassian Koenemann seeks to rekindle that fire for a new generation with his inspired presentation of Marmion's key spiritual insights. To this task he brings a monk's sensitivity to friendship with God, a schoolteacher's focus o...

The gates of Drancy Internment Camp in the northeast suburbs of Paris served as a holding pen for thousands of Jews during the German occupation of France in World War II. Jean Wahl, philosophy professor, poet, bachelor at the top of Parisian society before his arrest, was among those very few who escaped. In this searing historical novel by W. C. Hackett, the story is told in Wahl's own voice, from the moment he passed beyond the gates of the camp to his harrowing flight for the Free Zone in...

Nearly a century after it was first published in 1925, Medieval Cities remains one of the most provocative works of medieval history ever written. Here, Henri Pirenne argues that it was not the invasion of the Germanic tribes that destroyed the civilization of antiquity, but rather the closing of Mediterranean trade by Arab conquest in the seventh century. The consequent interruption of long-distance commerce accelerated the decline of the ancient cities of Europe. Pirenne challenges conventi...

An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John In this extended meditation, Anthony Esolen looks, phrase by phrase, at the majestic Prologue to the Gospel of John, which with good reason he calls "the most influential paragraph in the history of man." He unfolds its theological richness by showing how the Apostle John has in mind, not only what he saw Jesus do and heard him say, but also the whole witness of Scripture before the time of Jesus, and the way the young Church proclaimed him. A uniq...

The Theology of the Christmas Mystery In Cradle of Redeeming Love, John Saward returns to the mystery of Christ's incarnation and birth. Drawing upon both the rich traditions of the Church and the writings of the great Christian mystics, he fashions a work both new and old, revolutionary and orthodox. This profoundly moving meditation on the meaning of the Incarnation will enrich any contemplation on the life of Christ. The subject of this book is the "Christmas" dogma: the divinely revealed ...

Selected Essays from The Josias (Volume 1: Family, City, and State) Wisdom, in the full sense, is a matter of knowing something that is not subject to political deliberation, that is, the First Principle and Last End of all things. It includes understanding the order of all things from that Principle and to that End-an order that we, as human beings, ought to reflect and embody in our own actions and in our common life in society. The political implications of this truth have been obscured in...

An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology First published in 1956, Frederick Wilhelmsen's Man's Knowledge of Reality remains a classic study in Thomistic epistemology. Wilhelmsen begins with an examination of what he refers to as Descartes' "critical problem"; namely, the supposed inability of philosophy to procure what Descartes calls "certain knowledge." Using Descartes' argument as a starting point, he then launches into a comprehensive examination of Thomistic Metaphysical Realism, focusi...

Advent Poems Each Advent season is new. Those most recent have been tumultuous: COVID, bitterly cold snows, visionaries speaking frankly of a coming apocalypse. But other things as well: our own issues, the creeping age factor, the death of loved ones. Advent, like a creaking old metal gate, corrects us every time. It lets us know that only one thing matters: the stable, that little crib where cows chewed hay. Children, and childlike adults, still find all the consolation they need there. We ...

St. Cecilia's, Brooklyn, 1871-1930 Here, in these pages, first published in 1931, is the story of the first sixty years of St. Cecilia's parish in Brooklyn, NY. Under the stewardship of Msgr. Edward McGolrick (1857-1938), an impressive network of social support that touched practically every aspect of a parishioner's life was built: a maternity hospital, a daycare center (the first of its kind in the country!), the largest Catholic parochial school building in America, a sports facility for h...

"Ceremonial may be interpreted as a spiritual obeisance to the created beauty of the world." So writes Abbie Graham in the Foreword to her Ceremonials of Common Days. In this succinct yet surprisingly profound work, Graham demonstrates this same "obeisance to beauty" in her own artful writing on the special celebrations, festivities, and traditions accompanying the four seasons. Looking not with the modern eye (which views such things as little more than random, culturally produced rituals) b...

Aquinas's Practical Principles for Reaching Heaven and Avoiding Hell 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 to avoid pain, or is it actively pursuing...

While Arthur Machen's mastery of dark and bizarre themes has been more than amply demonstrated to countless readers-and enthusiasts-in such well-known works of horror as The Great God Pan, his forays into more ecstatic and mystical realms remain woefully neglected. In this charming, if utterly perplexing novella, Machen begins his story in the anxious, dark, despairing streets of 1915 London, then in short order leads the reader to a transfigured world in western Wales, where a small village ...

Mohammed and Charlemagne the last book penned by Belgian historian Henri Pirenne before his death in 1935, is in many ways the culmination of his lifelong study of medieval history. As Professor of History at the University of Ghent from 1886 until 1930 (with a brief hiatus during Germany's invasion of Belgium during World War I), Pirenne contributed many works to the study of medieval Europe. Not the least of these is the present volume, left unfinished at the time of his death but meticulou...

Edith Stein was a figure most singular and rare. Even within the purview of the illustrious history of the Church's saints, few can lay claim to so powerful a marriage of faith and intellect. Born into a devout Jewish family in 1891, her intellectual abilities did not long go unnoticed and in 1913 she moved to Göttingen in Germany to study philosophy under Edmund Husserl. There, as destiny would have it, she encountered a work on the life of Saint Teresa of Ávila, which lead her to a profound...

Few religious figures have enjoyed such notoriety as John Henry Newman. His conversion from Anglicanism to the Catholic Church, chronicled in his extensive writing, has been the source of endless debate and discussion. The difficulty confronting the modern reader when faced with such a controversial figure is the task of accurately deciphering his precise thoughts and ideas. In A Newman Synthesis, Erich Przywara has done us exactly this service. In these pages the reader will find an extensiv...

From the Medieval Bank to Financial Globalization This book, perhaps startlingly, is about finance from a Christian point of view, taking its start from the Gospels and moving forward to modern Catholic Social Teaching and today's opaque money markets, pausing along the way to delve into the origins of finance in the Christian Middle Ages. Not only those with a Christian orientation, but anyone looking for a coherent, moral view of finance will profit from its keen insights. Markets represent...

Too little intimate history has been written of common people in the Middle Ages. Most "comprehensive" works pass them by in favor of tales of monarchs and warriors. Yet if we truly wish to form an accurate understanding of how life was during a certain period, it is to the lives of ordinary people that we should first direct out attention. It is precisely this strategy that Eileen Power employs in Medieval People. In this refreshingly insightful collection of lives untouched by fame, Power g...

A Historical Study It may be useless to deny that most of the West functions under the reign of capitalism, but despite this fact the question of the origin of this paradigm and how it came to such a prominent position in our society remains unclear. This is the vital question.  Religion and the Rise of Capitalism aims to address. In what has proven something of a minor classic, R. H. Tawney sets his sights high, returning to the Middle Ages to examine the history of both capitalism and reli...

This masterpiece of modern apologetics builds upon the intrinsic, formative principle within thought-namely, being. Having established the idea of being (indeed, of Absolute Being) as essential to all coherent thought, the author shows that it was a failure to appreciate the analogy of being that led to the disastrous errors of Kant and postmodern philosophy-for the analogia entis links all that exists. After beginning with philosophy, the book's clear aim is to demolish postmodernism, to str...

Originally published in 1925, Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World was a groundbreaking work that redefined the concept of modern science. It is a work not only of the first importance but also of great beauty in which the author dramatically describes what had long engaged his meditations; namely, the rise, triumph, and impact of "scientific materialism," according to which nature consists of nothing else but a flux of purely physical energy, while at the same time criticizi...

Passages From the Writings of Eric Gill Eric Gill (1882-1940) is well known as a sculptor, wood and stone carver, letter, engraver, typeface designer, and graphic artist. But he was also a radical religious and social philosopher-a Christian revolutionary-for whom "life was more than art," because it was the highest art, the art of being human. Thus his interests were never theoretical and his view of life was holistic, involving the whole person in a unity of art, work and spiritual values. ...

MYTH. WISDOM. APOCALYPSE. Three words of ancient pedigree offering the seeker a promise: to unlock the door of understanding to the highest things-the divine things. Three keys, then, for a "Philosophy in Word and Name" that wants, simply, to comprehend whatever makes the meaning of our humanity take on its fullest scope and significance.

Mitre and Crook, Fr. Houghton's 1979 classic novel is a timeless piece of fiction. Its themes of tradition competing with modernism remain pertinent today, making this book highly relevant despite its age. Captivating and funny, Mitre and Crook will keep readers engaged every step of the way as it offers an insightful look into the complexities of religion, politics and identity.This is a book that challenges its audience to reassess long-held beliefs, consider different interpretations and t...

Beneath the Silent Heavens reimagines the story of the Flood and the Ark, with epochs whirled together, populated with patriarchs and hipsters, artists, intellectuals, peasants, high rhetoric and hearthside banter, words of passion and skepticism, and animals who still have the way of speech-all against the backdrop of Noe's struggles.

In this thought-provoking book, Roberto Spataro provides readers with a compelling argument for the relevance of the Tridentine Mass and Latin language to joyful evangelization. Drawing from Pope Francis’s call for renewed evangelical excitement, Spataro shows how the forms of the ancient Latin liturgy provide clarity in a chaotic world. He set out to prove that despite often being viewed as stodgy and passé, Latin still has the power to unite Catholicism into a cohesive whole that highlights...

Chivalry, Christendom, and Catholic Culture Portraits of Spiritual Nobility is a timeless collection of stories, homages and reflections written by world-renowned theologian Tracey Rowland. In this stimulating volume, Rowland illuminates the mysteries and morals espoused by Catholicism and how they are applied in daily life to promote spiritual nobility and charity. From Pope John Paul II to Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Portraits of Spiritual Nobility takes the reader on an incredible journey th...

Subversive Catholicism: Papacy, Liturgy, Church is an authoritative and illuminating read from acclaimed German novelist Martin Mosebach. In this collection of essays, Mosebach attests to the remarkable power of full-blooded Catholicism - a power that continually subverts expectations and transcends time. Despite the flaws and failures of those who claim its title, it is the Church that remains perpetually alive with a transcendent gospel. This book offers incredible insights into how the Chu...

It’s said that friendship is one of life’s greatest treasures, and with The Four Friendships: From Aristotle to Aquinas, readers will gain the valuable insight needed to build and maintain beautiful friendships. Authored by Kevin Vost, this work examines the works of four great thinkers on friendship with a focus on practical advice for today's world.The journey begins in Ancient Greece, once considered the birthplace of “modern” philosophy. Readers are guided through writings by Aristotle th...

500 Years of Protestantism and Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society With essays from John Rao, Chris Ferrara, Brian McCall, and eight others, Luther and His Progeny is a signal contribution toward understanding the full import of the Protestant revolt, and the best guide available for Catholics to the meaning of Luther's decisive break.

The Hidden Laws of World History In The Order of the Ages, Robert Bolton explains the principles that relate the modern world to earlier ages, and the position of our own era in a universal time-cycle, revealing the essential nature of time. He shows that time imposes patterns of its own on the order of events, which reveal themselves by numerical regularities. By means of a Platonic view of creation--which connects temporal with non-temporal realities--we come to see how man's inner life hol...

The Little Way to Jesus The prayer of the heart is one of the dearest treasures of Christianity. It transforms any prayer by the fire of God's love, allowing for an immersion in Christ whereby He is able to communicate to us the Holy Spirit. In his new book Praying with the Heart: The Little Way to Jesus, Jean Khoury entrusts to us the secret of the sustainable and successful way of practicing prayer of the heart. While remaining rooted in the living Tradition, the book offers new and abundan...

From Medieval miniatures to Renaissance paintings to modern Christmas cards, few Western images are as evocative and enigmatic as the Three Wise Men at the Nativity. After twenty years of research and travel by the author, this new novel explores why and how these mysterious figures braved such dangers and survived such fearsome challenges that they have endured in our minds and culture for two thousand years. The Test of the Magi reveals the timeless emotional bond between student and teache...

Generations of devout Catholics, including many learned theologians and writers, have derived great spiritual benefits from a careful reading of the private revelations here compiled, those of Ven. Anne Catherine Emmerich and Ven. Mary of Agreda, primarily, along with those of St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Elizabeth of Schoenau. From the birth of Mary to her Coronation in Heaven, this book provides the reader with remarkable insights into the life of Our Lady, and an unmatched depth of unders...

The Prayer Life of Jesus and How to Make It Our Own "Lord, teach us to pray"--the petition of the most intimate followers of Jesus--remains the heartfelt petition of every Christian disciple down to the present day. The divine gift of the Our Father is the foundation of our life of prayer, but it is only the beginning of how Jesus leads us through himself to the Father: then as now, he teaches the Church to pray, and he does the same for us in our individual prayer lives. Shane Kapler's Throu...

Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton describes how a true Catholic education is both a program of liturgical catechesis and an inculturation that aims for the supernatural transformation of the person so that he can in turn transfigure the whole culture through the divine beauty of his daily action. There is no human activity, no matter how mundane, that cannot be enhanced by this formation in beauty. Such enhanced activity th...

Newman on Evangelizing the Nones In post-modern society the "nones" have become our new poor. The West still commands vast markets and militaries but our culture has long been living off of borrowed moral capital with no foreseeable schedule of repayment. In Thinking as Though God Exists, Catholic philosopher Ryan Topping draws upon St. John Henry Newman's voluminous insights to present a far-ranging cultural strategy for the New Evangelization. The conversion of secular culture requires many...

How to Spread the Faith Like Jesus Did In The Old Evangelization, Sammons goes back to the source, taking a look at what Jesus did (and didn't do) when he preached the Good News and drawing out the lessons he taught us. All evangelization begins with a personal "encounter." And so Sammons examines Jesus' most instructive Gospel encounters - with the Samaritan woman at the well, for instance, or with the rich young man- and discovers within each a particular truth that, even 2,000 years later,...

Unlocking the 24 Titles Given to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew Christ's contemporaries ascribed many names and titles to Him, as we see recorded in the New Testament. Each one tells us something different about who Jesus is. In this book, Eric Sammons frames a series of thoughtful reflections on the names of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew with references from the Church Fathers, saints, and Doctors of the Church. He translates the depth of the mystery of the Faith so readers can discover new...

The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories We must continue to demand justice and compassion for victims of Catholic clergy abuse. This is not optional. However, there is a side of the Catholic Church abuse narrative that is not getting the attention it warrants. Countless priests in the United States have been falsely accused of committing horrendous child abuse. Topics in this book include:... how the most recent and reliable figures reveal that one-third of accused Catholic priests in a major archd...

The Earliest Chronicle of the First Crusade This new translation offers a faithful yet accessible English-language rendering of the twelfth-century Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolomitanorum, the earliest known Latin account of the First Crusade. Although an anonymous work, it has become the exemplar for all later histories and retellings of the First Crusade. As such, it is filled with vivid descriptions of the hardships suffered by the crusaders, with deeds of personal heroism, with cour...