Bücher der Reihe Catholic Ideas for a Secular World

It is commonly observed that behind many of the political and cultural issues that we face today lies an impoverished conception of freedom. Freedom from Reality presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition.

Political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and the result is a book about one of the world's most complex thinkers.

Working from within the contours of Christian faith, this book examines the relation between two ways of forming families - through nature (by procreation) and through history (by adoption). Gilbert Meilaender takes up a range of issues raised by the practice of adoption, always seeking to do justice to both nature and history in the formation of families.

In 2005, Father Julian Carron became the leader of the global ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, following the death of the movement's founder, Father Luigi Giussani. Disarming Beauty is the English translation of an engaging and thought-provoking collection of essays by one of the principal Catholic leaders and intellectuals in the world today.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the first attempt to evaluate Elshtain's entire published body of work and to give shape to a wide-ranging scholarly career.

Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this English translation of Le Regne de l'homme, Brague argues that with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future.

Pierre Manent is one of France's leading political philosophers. This first English translation of his profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l'homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition.

As a cure for modernity's individualism, Remi Brague urges a return to medieval thinking to illustrate why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving.

In Montaigne: Life without Law, originally published in French in 2014 and now translated for the first time into English by Paul Seaton, Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne's three-volume work Essays. Although Montaigne's writings resist easy analysis, Manent finds in them a subtle unity, and demonstrates the philosophical depth of Montaigne's reflections and the distinctive, even radical, character of his central ideas. To show Montaigne's unique contribution to modern philosophy, Manent compares his work to other modern thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pascal, and Rousseau. What does human life look like without the imposing presence of the state? asks Manent. In raising this question about Montaigne's Essays, Manent poses a question of great relevance to our contemporary situation. He argues that Montaigne's philosophical reflections focused on what he famously called la condition humaine, the human condition. Manent tracks Montaigne's development of this fundamental concept, focusing especially on his reworking of pagan and Christian understandings of virtue and pleasure, disputation and death. Bringing new form and content together, a new form of thinking and living is presented by Montaigne's Essays, a new model of a thoughtful life from one of the unsung founders of modernity.Throughout, Manent suggests alternatives and criticisms, some by way of contrasts with other thinkers, some in his own name. This is philosophical engagement at a very high level. In showing the unity of Montaigne's work, Manent's study will appeal especially to students and scholars of political theory, the history of modern philosophy, modern literature, and the origins of modernity.

Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law discusses legal, political, and cultural difficulties that arise from the crisis of authority in the modern world.Is there any connection linking some of the maladies of modern life-"e;cancel culture,"e; the climate of mendacity in public and academic life, fierce conflicts over the Constitution, disputes over presidential authority? Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law argues that these diverse problems are all a consequence of what Hannah Arendt described as the disappearance of authority in the modern world. In this perceptive study, Steven D. Smith offers a diagnosis explaining how authority today is based in pervasive fictions and how this situation can amount to, as Arendt put it, "e;the loss of the groundwork of the world."e;Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law considers a variety of problems posed by the paradoxical ubiquity and absence of authority in the modern world. Some of these problems are jurisprudential or philosophical in character; others are more practical and lawyerly-problems of presidential powers and statutory and constitutional interpretation; still others might be called existential. Smith's use of fictions as his purchase for thinking about authority has the potential to bring together the descriptive and the normative and to think about authority as a useful hypothesis that helps us to make sense of the empirical world. This strikingly original book shows that theoretical issues of authority have important practical implications for the kinds of everyday issues confronted by judges, lawyers, and other members of society. The book is aimed at scholars and students of law, political science, and philosophy, but many of the topics it addresses will be of interest to politically engaged citizens.

Retrieving Freedom is a provocative, big-picture book, taking a long view of the "e;rise and fall"e; of the classical understanding of freedom.In response to the evident shortcomings of the notion of freedom that dominates contemporary discourse, Retrieving Freedom seeks to return to the sources of the Western tradition to recover a more adequate understanding. This book begins by setting forth the ancient Greek conception-summarized from the conclusion of D. C. Schindler's previous tour de force of political and moral reasoning, Freedom from Reality-and the ancient Hebrew conception, arguing that at the heart of the Christian vision of humanity is a novel synthesis of the apparently opposed views of the Greeks and Jews. This synthesis is then taken as a measure that guides an in-depth exploration of landmark figures framing the history of the Christian appropriation of the classical tradition. Schindler conducts his investigation through five different historical periods, focusing in each case on a polarity, a pair of figures who represent the spectrum of views from that time: Plotinus and Augustine from late antiquity, Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor from the patristic period, Anselm and Bernard from the early middle ages, Bonaventure and Aquinas from the high middle ages, and, finally, Godfrey of Fontaines and John Duns Scotus from the late middle ages. In the end, we rediscover dimensions of freedom that have gone missing in contemporary discourse, and thereby identify tasks that remain to be accomplished. Schindler's masterful study will interest philosophers, political theorists, and students and scholars of intellectual history, especially those who seek an alternative to contemporary philosophical understandings of freedom.