Jesus Shock is the second in a series of short works on seminal concerns of the impact that Jesus Christ made in the world. The first work, The Philosophy of Jesus (St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), explored philosophy in light of Jesus, rather than the other way around. The present work investigates the reception Jesus received both in His lifetime and continuously to the present time, not only from His enemies, but from His friends, a reception of shock, astonishment, even disgust.
  Perhaps a few remarks from the book best explains it:

The point of the book:
 The point of the title: Imagine a storm has downed a telephone wire so that everyone who touches it is shocked in every cell of his body. Well, the storm of God’s crazy love has “downed” (incarnated) Jesus, and everyone who touches this “live wire” is shocked in every cell of his soul.
 The question of the book: Why is “Jesus” the most non-neutral, the most controversial, the most embarrassing name in the world? Why is talking about Jesus like talking about sex?
 This whole book is really about a single movie line, the greatest line in the greatest movie in history. Bet you know what it is.
 Jesus-Shock is about the Real Presence of Christ in the Gospels and in the Eucharist. It
is not about the theology of the Real Presence, but about the experience of Him there, and about the experience of everyone in the Gospels who met Him.

 What was the bitterest controversy of the Protestant Reformation, both between Protestants and Catholics and between different Protestant denominations, the one that had both sides calling the other not just heretics but devils?   
 Answer: It was not Justification by Faith, the hallmark of the Reformation, even though that question is about nothing less momentous than how to be saved, how to get to Heaven. It was not the relation between religion and politics, even though that was a matter of life or death (literally, on battlefields and at guillotines and hangings) and not just a matter of truth or falsity, or of good or evil. It was not about the sufficiency of the Bible, or the corruption in the Church, or the relation between the Bible and the Church. It was not about the Pope, and the governance of the Church. It was not about Mary or saints or angels or Purgatory. It was not about the Incarnation or the Trinity or the Atonement.
 It was about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

 Jesus-Shock, in addressing this controversy forcefully and faithfully, shows the reasons why to this day the name of “Jesus” stirs up controversy, even revulsion, in polite society. In the true spirit of ecumenism, it also points the way toward a true rapprochement among His modern-day disciples.

In addition to “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government,” this new selection of Mill’s writings includes, among others, a number of less known of his writings, such as: “Civilization,” “Perfectibility,” “The Negro Question,” “On Education,” “On Aristocracy,” “On Marriage,” “On Free Press,” “Socialism,” Mill’s review of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” his letters to Tocqueville, and several other writings.

If one can use a somewhat exaggerated language, Mill’s writings are to liberal-democracy what Marx and Engels’ writings were to Communism. Both systems gave expression to 19th century man’s longing for equality and justice, both promised to liberate him from the shackles of oppression, authority and tradition. Instead of liberating man, Communism created the most brutal system in human history, and its spectacular fall in 1989 is one of history’s greatest events. Western world today shows that liberal-democracy is no longer a benign doctrine, which advocates free market, minimum state and individual liberties, but, like Communism, is an all-encompassing ideology which forces an individual to abdicate his freedom and soul in favor of a Communist-like collective.

As many critics of real Socialism could see the seeds of totalitarianism in the writings of Marx and Engels, so one can see the seeds of liberal totalitarianism in Mill’s writings. This new edition is intended to help readers to understand why democratic-liberalism came so close to its 19th century ideological rival.

Jokes, Life after Death, and God has two main tasks: to try to understand exactly what a joke is, and to see whether there are any connections between jokes, on the one hand, and life after death and God, on the other hand. But it pursues other tasks as well, tasks of an ancillary sort.
    This book devises a general and comprehensive, but brief, theory of jokes. The author begins with critiques of other writers’ views on the subject. 1) Ted Cohen thinks that such a theory is impossible. 2) Ronald Berk, on the other hand, provides just such a theory. And 3) John Morreall provides a general theory of laughter, which may include some things which can be used in a general theory of jokes. 4) Neil Schaeffer, too, provides a general theory of laughter, which makes a big point out of what he calls the “ludicrous context”; but he does include a chapter on jokes. 5) Christopher Wilson offers a general theory of jokes in which he focuses on form and content. And 6) Thomas Werge, in reflecting on the comic, suggests a general theory of jokes which identifies their matter, form, agents, purposes, and beyond these, the underlying shared relational context, which makes it possible for jokes to arise. 7) Bill Fuller’s message is that there is more funniness coming out of two or more heads than out of one, just as Socrates’ message was that there is more clarity coming out of two or more heads than out of one. 8) Umberto Eco feels that monks should laugh, just as ordinary people do; for laughter not only refreshes our seeking spirits, it also illuminates the truth we seek. 9) Simon Critchley, in his reflections on humor, notes that jokes bring on a kind of everyday anamnesis, that they are anti-story stories, that they are like prayers, that they are like philosophy; and that they require a certain underlying context, which is implicitly recognized by both teller and listener, and which renders possible the tension needed to make the punch line work. 10) Martha Wolfenstein, pursuing a psychological analysis of children’s humor, proposes that the underlying motive for telling jokes remains the same from childhood to adulthood, i.e., to transform painful and frustrating experiences so as to extract pleasure from them; and that the agent or productive cause of jokes is the repressing unconscious, as suggested by Freud.
    As John Morreall has argued, neither the Superiority Theory (as in Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes), nor the Relief Theory (as in Spencer and Freud), nor the Incongruity Theory (as in Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard) appears to work as a general and comprehensive theory. Moreover, these writers talk more about humor and laughter than about jokes. To be sure, a joke is a type of humor. Thus, to say something about humor is to say something, though of a generic sort, about jokes. Similarly, to say something about the laughter caused by humor is to say something, though generic, about the laughter caused by jokes. Most of the authors considered in chapter one are concerned with jokes, and not only with humor as such. Section 11 of chapter one puts together, out of the combined contributions of these authors, what can be considered the beginnings of, some thoughts toward, a general and comprehensive theory of jokes. This task the author illustrates in a concrete way, by looking at individual jokes of different sorts; not, however, without inviting the reader to enjoy these jokes. The author looks particularly at Jewish jokes, Christian jokes, and Islamic jokes (jokes in three major religious traditions), jokes about philosophy and philosophers (philosophers ought to be able to laugh at themselves and at what they do), yo mama jokes (out of a healthy curiosity), Italian jokes and Slovak jokes, all of which makes for a clearer understanding of exactly what a joke is.
    The analysis of general theory is then followed by some views on the morality of jokes and joke-telling, and an analysis of the connection between jokes and life after death, on the one hand, and God, on the other. Throughout  the book Bobik offers innumerable examples to heighten our understanding and entertain us.

This volume, the original version of which was published in 1988, brings to a close the autobiographical writings of a modern Christian philosopher who lived through the two World Wars and the ecclesiastical upheaval in the Catholic Church in the context of the Second Vatican Council. What stamps this philosopher throughout the course of his life – with all its social and political uncertainties – is his constant dedication to truth and his manifest unswerving integrity.

Themes with which the reader of his previous works would be well acquainted recur in this volume. The dedicated Catholic philosopher, who preferred his independence as a trainer of teachers to the less independent role of a professor in a Catholic university, was quite prepared to criticize developments in the Church which resulted from Vatican II. In his defense of the sacred, which he deemed threatened by popularizing trends in the Church, he criticized what he saw as the watered down language in modern German translations of Church liturgical texts; the growing preference for secular garb; and the compromising developments which saw the sacramental signs – surrounding baptism, for instance – being reduced to such an extent that they no longer had the power to signify their sacred meaning even to a well-intentioned congregation.

A great lover of the philosophy of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas – among many others –, Pieper highlighted the need for living a life of truth. He did not consider truth to be merely something abstract but as something to be lived existentially. While he could explain his philosophy in clear rational terms, something which especially stood to him in his post-war lectures to eager students who were hungry for intellectual guidance and leadership, the great interest of his philosophy was, possibly, his preoccupation with mystery – that which impinges on our inner lives but frustrates all our attempts to account for it in purely rational terms.

As a philosopher – one might say a Christian philosopher – Pieper seems to have observed the traditional boundaries drawn between philosophy and theology. His generation was exposed to the modernist debates in the Church. It would have been deemed heretical to say that the Divine could be grasped by our purely human thought processes – access to the Divine being only possible through faith and grace. Pieper was no heretic. But he was also not altogether conservative. In fact, his philosophy, closely allied to existentialism – despite his care, for instance, to distance himself from the negative existentialism of Sartre – focused on the individual’s inner existential grasp of the most profound reality. Truth is to be found within us, even if it remains a mystery. What lies beyond death is, for the individual, the ultimate mystery.