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Saint Augustine's political thought has usually been interpreted by modern readers as suggesting that politics is based on sin. In Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, John von Heyking shows that Augustine actually considered political life a substantive good that fulfills a human longing for a kind of wholeness. Rather than showing Augustine as supporting the Christian church's domination of politics, von Heyking argues that he held a subtler view of the relationship between religion and politics, one that preserves the independence of political life. And while many see his politics as based on a natural-law ethic or on one in which authority is conferred by direct revelation, von Heyking shows how Augustine held to an understanding of political ethics that emphasizes practical wisdom and judgment in a mode that resembles Aristotle rather than Machiavelli.

The thesis of this book is straightforward: Tilley argues that theodicy as a discourse practice creates evils while theodicists ignore or distort classic texts in the Christian tradition, unwittingly efface genuine evils in their attempts to justify God, and silence the voice of the suffering and the oppressed by writing them out of the theological picture. The result is often a theological legitimation of intolerable social evils.

Recent decades have seen a steady trend in Roman Catholic teaching toward a commitment to active nonviolence that could qualify the church as a "peace church." As a moral theologian specializing in social ethics, Schlabach explores how this trend in Catholic social teaching will need to take shape if Catholics are to follow through. Globalization, he argues, is an invitation to recognize what was always supposed to be true in Catholic ecclesiology: Christ gives Christians an identity that crosses borders. To become a truly catholic global peace church in which peacemaking is church-wide and parish-deep, Catholics should recognize that they have always properly been a diaspora people with an identity that transcends tribe and nation-state.

The notion of “natural law” has repeatedly furnished human beings with a shared grammar in times of moral and cultural crisis. Stoic natural law, for example, emerged precisely when the Ancient World lost the Greek polis, which had been the point of reference for Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophy. In key moments such as this, natural law has enabled moral and legal dialogue between peoples and traditions holding apparently clashing world-views. This volume revisits some of these key moments in intellectual and social history, partly with an eye to extracting valuable lessons for ideological conflicts in the present and perhaps near future. The contributions to this volume discuss both historical and contemporary schools of natural law. Topics on historical schools of natural law include: how Aristotelian theory of rules paved the way for the birth of the idea of "natural law"; the idea's first mature account in Cicero's work; the tension between two rival meanings of “man’s rational nature” in Aquinas’ natural law theory; and the scope of Kant’s allusions to “natural law”. Topics on contemporary natural law schools include: John Finnis's and Germain Grisez's “new natural law theory”; natural law theories in a "broader" sense, such as Adolf Reinach’s legal phenomenology; Ortega y Gasset’s and Scheler’s “ethical perspectivism”; the natural law response to Kelsen’s conflation of democracy and moral relativism; natural law's role in 20th century international law doctrine; Ronald Dworkin’s understanding of law as “a branch of political morality”; and Alasdair Macintyre’s "virtue"-based approach to natural law.​

Through extensive textual analysis, this book concludes that the prevailing opinion about the nature of modern and contemporary philosophy is wrong. It maintains that almost all modern and contemporary philosophy is deconstructed, secularized, Augustinian theology, not philosophy. The work is divided into eight chapters, a guest Foreword by Herbert I. London (President of the Hudson Institute and Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University) notes, bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 (Protagoras Sees the Ghost of Hippo) considers Cartesian thought, Hobbes, and Newton. Chapter 2 (I Feel the Spirit Move Me) examines Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Chapter 3 (The Urge to Emerge) investigates Lessing and Rousseau. Chapters 4 (To Dream the Impossible Dream) and 5 (Wake Up, Wake Up, You Sleepyhead) treat Kant. Chapters 6 (I Am Music) and 7 (Looking for God in All The Wrong Places) deal with Hegel. Chapter 8 (Dirty Dancing: Higher Education as Enlightened Swindling) concludes that a lack of philosophical and historical experience coupled with a widespread inability to read philosophical texts according to the intention of the author (1) causes us to mistake secularized theology for philosophy and (2) is a main cause for the decline of contemporary universities.

In Dust Bound for Heaven Reinhard Hütter shows how Thomas Aquinas's view of the human being as dust bound for heaven weaves together elements of two questions without fusion or reduction. Does humanity still have an insatiable thirst for God that sends each person on an irrepressible religious quest that only the vision of God can quench? Or must the human being, living after the fall, become a "new creation" in order to be readied for heaven? Htter also applies Thomas's anthropology to a host of pressing contemporary concerns, including the modern crisis of faith and reason, political theology, the relationship between divine grace and human freedom, and many more. The concluding chapter explores the Christological center of Thomas's theology.

This Dictionary provides a unique and groundbreaking survey of both the historical and contemporary interrelations between ethics, theology and society. In over 250 separately-authored entries, a selection of the world's leading scholars from many disciplines and many denominations present their own views on a wide range of topics. Arranged alphabetically, entries cover all aspects of philosophy, theology, ethics, economics, politics and government. Each entry includes: * a concise definition of the term * a description of the principal ideas behind it * analysis of its history, development and contemporary relevance * a detailed bibliography giving the major sources in the field The entire field is prefaced by an editorial introduction outlining its scope and diversity. Selected entries include: Animal Rights * Capital Punishment * Communism * Domestic Violence * Ethics * Evil * Government * Homophobia * Humanism * Liberation Theology * Politics * Pornography * Racism * Sexism * Society * Vivisection * Women's Ordination

In this second volume of the Called Out of Darkness trilogy, Father Robert Spitzer, S.J., draws together some of the best advice given by Catholic spiritual masters across the ages and brings it into harmony with modern scientific research, offering practical ways to live out the gospel in our busy days. It is a roadmap to a deeper relationship with the Lord and to authentic transformation through the imitation of Christ. Giving evidence that Jesus established just one Church, with Peter as its head, Spitzer shows that the Catholic Church—with its rich array of sacraments, teachings, prayer traditions, and lived examples of holiness—continues to be fertile ground for profound Christian conversion. But no true conversion is purely spiritual; it must bear fruit in our daily lives. Father Spitzer guides readers through the workings of moral transformation, with detailed sketches of all the cardinal and theological virtues, especially love. Using insights from Saint Ignatius of Loyola, as well as from modern psychology, Escape from Evil's Darkness concludes with an in-depth study of the sacrament of confession and the staggering power of God's loving mercy.

Susannah Ticciati explores Augustine's scriptural interpretation, as well as the ways in which he understands the character of signs in theory. The book explores Augustine's scriptural world via three case studies, each geared towards the healing of a particular modern opposition. The three, interrelated, modern oppositions are rooted in an insufficient semiotic worldview. Ticciati argues they contribute to the alienation of the modern reader not only from Augustine's scriptural world, but more generally from the scriptural world as habitation. Examining the ways in which the therapy for our modern day semiotic illiteracy can be found in the 5th-6th-century Augustine, Ticciati brings close readings of Augustine to bear on significant concerns of our own day: specifically, our modern alienations from the rich world of Scripture.