Books Published by St. Augustine's Press

Paul Voss and Donald Prudlo trace Western attitudes to money, merchants, and the market through 3,000 years of history. They focus their attention on one person in particular, Omobono of Cremona (1117-1197), as an axial figure in the wholesale reappraisal of the value of business, entrepreneurship, and white-collar work in Christian Europe. More precisely, Voss and Prudlo examine the evolution of the mentality of wealth and economics in the Catholic Church, beginning from the Scriptural disda...

"The ultimate of human happiness is to be found in contemplation".In offering this proposition of Thomas Aquinas to our thought, Josef Pieper uses traditional wisdom in order to throw light on present-day reality and present-day psychological problems. What, in fact, does one pursue in pursuing happiness? What, in the consensus of the wisdom of the early Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, of the New Testament, of Augustine and Aquinas, is that condition of perfect bliss toward which all life and...

"This book almost didn't exist. I was about to write a serious, heavy book entitled How To Save Western Civilization, as a sequel to my book How To Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss. But writing it was not making me happy, and reading it was not going to make anybody else happy either. And then I stopped just long enough for my guardian angel to squeeze through that tiny window of opportunity that I had opened up by my silence and to whisper this commonsense...

​​One of the most studied and critiqued documents of the papal magisterium is largely spoken of with regards to moral theology and the refutation of modern error. Yet Adrian Reimers points out that, as affirmed by this encyclical, the moral life is itself a realm of love and freedom, a place of intimacy with the Creator as much as interaction with others. Reimers is eager to show that the Encyclical is more innovative than it looks, just as morality is not just about the correction of error. ...

The Federalist Papers offers an expansive vision of the American Constitution and the original sense of the federal character of the American government. What is contained in these eternally studied arguments is a complex construction of American federalism, and approaching this body of work with its full context in view is necessary but often difficult to achieve. Harvey Flaumenhaft has therefore provided readers with a unique, visual resource to be used as a companion to the primary text wr...

In this stimulating and still-timely study, Josef Pieper takes up a theme of paramount importance to his thinking - that festivals belong by rights among the great topics of philosophical discussion. As he develops his theory of festivity, the modern age comes under close and painful scrutiny. It is obvious that we no longer know what festivity is, namely, the celebration of existence under various symbolsPieper exposes the pseudo-festivals, in their harmless and their sinister forms: traditi...

In ordinary conversation, including among the "educated", the word "sin" rarely gets mentioned except when one is trying to be coy or facetious. As Thomas Mann once said, "sin" is nowadays "an amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh".But this small work will interpret sin in its true -- that is, serious -- meaning. What will emerge from its analysis is the discovery that the concept of sin can still serve to unlock the mystery of existence, at least for a thinking that wants ...

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 importanc...

Just as Aristotelian metaphysics provided a new basis for the natural theology of Aquinas's time, so too, positive psychology provides a basis for a natural moral theology in our own time. this book marshals the empirically verifiable findings of positive psychology that show the wisdom of the Christian tradition. Christian warnings about the dangers of greed, coveting a neighbor's goods (social comparison), and pride find an empirical verification. Likewise, positive psychology vindicates th...

What is influence and why might real influencers be those whose names we no longer remember? Ken Weisbrode embarks on an exploration to trace the most powerful strands of cultural and intellectual influence, and demonstrates it might not be what we think it is."The influencer is a person who made an art of absence in the trade of cultural and sometimes political capital. The ones in this book represent a range of vocations, from politics to diplomacy to novel-writing, but almost all were cult...

The Conquistador with His Pants Down: David Ramsay Steele's Legendary Lost Lectures assembles fourteen of the penetrating, provocative presentations by this controversial libertarian speaker and writer. The targets of Steele's acerbic and witty criticisms include Scott Adams, Mattias Desmet, Sigmund Freud, Sam Harris, Karl Marx, George Orwell, Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand, and all things conventionally Wokish. Steele's heroes encompass Immanuel Kant, Robert Michels, Ludwig von Mises, Dexter Morg...

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 ...

This new series of scholarly reflections on the interpretation of Socratic philosophy is an inviting combination of intuition and meticulous analysis. Ryszard Legutko provides the reader a monumental service in his confrontation of the most important and influential literature written on the subject to date. He likewise opens the conversation to European contributions and renders Socrates truly a figurehead of future philosophy far beyond being a pillar in ancient thought.Legutko argues that ...

The muse of Pietro Federico's most recent collection of poems, La Maggioranza delle Stelle ( Most of the Stars), is the United States of America, her people and landscapes. In fifty poems (one for each state), Federico plumbs the depths of the historic, geographic, political, emotional, psychological, and metaphysical realms through a variety of voices of these fifty states. Translated from Italian into English by the author with American poet John Poch, this book is unlike any other collecti...

Pope Francis has declared the Jubilee Year 2025 a celebration of both mercy and hope, merging his own favorite theme with John Paul II's call in 2000 for all mankind to enter the new millennium with the light of Christian hope. The motto of the Holy Year 2025 centers on the image "pilgrims of hope." Visits to sacred places--especially in Rome--is a principal expectation and much has been organized in the Eternal City to welcome visitors. Pilgrims are encouraged to rekindle their light by retu...

The importance of engaging the problems of contemporary political theory has brought us to an unprecedented reliance on the historical commentary already provided by giants like Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke. Among these is also the less often noted Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and his landmark work, The Ancient City.Fustel de Coulanges plunged deep into the world and language of the ancient Greeks and Romans. His presentation of religion as a factor in civilization equates to a vi...

"Poetry is language at play. In New Songs of Innocence S.J. Hodson is hard at work in this playground teasing us with syllabic verse ("Beside Himself with Calm"), haiku stanzas ("A Cougar Strolled By"), sonnet, ("Sonnet for Miriam"), and villanelle ("A Poet's Dark Night of the Soul"). He relishes the natural rhythm of speech and knows how to polish it metrically. He rhymes in wonderfully complex ways, combining end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, sight rhyme and the unexpected sudden brea...