In On the Cessation of the Laws, Grosseteste draws out the theological, christological, and soteriological issues implicit in the question of the relationship between the Old and New Covenants.

In this collection of essays, Francis Russell Hittinger shows that Catholic social teaching is not only an articulate defense of the dignity of the human person, but perhaps more fundamentally an elucidation of the dignity of society. Indeed, Hittinger enables us to see that one cannot properly defend the dignity of the person without also showing the dignity of societies in which human persons – as naturally familial, political, and ecclesial animals – seek their own perfection in communion with others. Hittinger has been a renowned scholar of Catholic social doctrine for some time now, and the essays presented here are the fruit of his mature thinking on the topic over the course of many years. As each chapter shows, Hittinger’s historically important body of work on Catholic moral and social philosophy and theology is rooted in natural law theory and Thomistic philosophy, but also animated by St. Augustine’s thought and thus consistently sensitive to historical contexts and arenas for moral and theological disputation. These magisterial essays therefore integrate historical studies of the development of Catholic social teaching with systematic exposition of the theological coherence of that tradition, while also articulating the essential role of philosophy and natural law within both. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part is comprised of six essays on Catholic social teaching, the second part is made up of six essays on natural law and its role in social doctrine, and the third part includes two essays discussing the first principles of the Church’s teaching on social issues. This collection will no doubt become a standard in the field of scholarship on Catholic social teaching.

Among the intellectuals of the Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century, few are as prolific and influential as Hrabanus Maurus (c.780-856), a monk and abbot of the monastery of Fulda and then archbishop of Mainz. Most famous among modern authors as the putative author of the hymn “Come, Holy Ghost,” Hrabanus was highly esteemed by generations of medieval intellectuals, including Dante, who located the archbishop among St. Bonaventure’s cohort in the sphere of the Sun. This volume presents for the first time in English translation Hrabanus’s pedagogical masterpiece On the Formation of Clergy (De institutione clericorum). Unveiled on the Feast of All Saints in 819, at the dedication of the great Salvator basilica, Hrabanus’ work addresses the most important focuses of the Carolingian Renaissance: education and ecclesiastical reform. The treatise promotes a careful balance between classical training and Christian ethics and features the robust pedagogy of the early medieval monastic curriculum. At points it even offers glimpses into the energetic environment of Fulda’s classrooms. On the Formation of Clergy also supplies a program for ecclesiastical reform. It provides readers with a primer on ecclesiastical hierarchy and liturgy, providing glosses on church offices and explanations of important church activities. Hrabanus divided his opus into three books. Book One explains Holy Orders. It lays out the distinctions between clergy and laity, enumerates the ranks of the priesthood, describes clerical vesture, and explores the sacraments. Book Two examines priestly life. It considers ascetic disciplines appropriate for priests at different grades, describes expected prayer routines, and identifies important doctrinal teachings and principal liturgical feasts. Book Three treats biblical studies and preaching. It lays out a curriculum for the liberal arts, connects the liberal arts to catechetics and homiletics, and integrates academic study with moral instruction. On the Formation of Clergy was widely read throughout the Middle Ages. Beyond its impact on the Carolingian Renaissance, the treatise guided legal analysis in Gratian’s Decretum, supplied examples for Peter Lombard’s Sentences, and is cited by theological titans from Rupert of Deutz to Thomas Aquinas to Gabriel Biel.

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Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672 –1750) was an Italian Catholic priest, notable as historian and a leading scholar of his age, and for his discovery of the Muratorian fragment, the earliest known list of New Testament books. No other book inspired Catholics of the 18th century more than Muratori's On the Moderation of Reason in Religious Matters. Ever since its publication in 1714, it had virtually a magisterial status by those who sought to revitalize the intellectual verve of Catholic theology. In essay form, Muratori addressed the fundamental challenges of doubt, authority, blind faith, the Copernican worldview, and the limitations of human reason. This work is a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of the intersection between religion and reason.

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to announce a new series, Early Modern Catholic Sources, edited by Ulrich L. Lehner and Trent Pomplun. This series – the only one of its kind – will provide translations of early modern Catholic texts of theological interest written between 1450 and 1800. The first volume in this series is On the Motive of the Incarnation, the first English translation of the seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelites at the University of Salmanca treatise on the motive of the Incarnation. Originally intended for students of their order, it became a major contribution to broader theological discourse. In this treatise, they defend the assertion that God intended Christ’s Incarnation essentially as a remedy for sin, such that if Adam had not sinned Christ would not have become incarnate, and that, at the same time, God intended all other works of nature and grace for the sake of Christ at their end. The Salmanticenses’ position thus combines elements of the Franciscan and Dominican traditions, stemming from the thought of Blessed John Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas. This treatise is an exhaustive effort to show how the Scotistic emphasis on the primacy of Christ as the first willed and intended by God can be articulated within a Thomistic framework that acknowledges the contingency of the Incarnation on the need for redemption. In addition to the translation, the volume will include a brief introduction and extensive notes for theologians, historians, and students.

In distinctive voice and tone, cultural commentator Glenn W. Olsen presents his latest work on the place of Catholicism in American history. Here he clarifies the meaning of American modernity for Catholics and shows the conflicts and tensions confronting the religious person today.

The first volume of our new series, Fathers of the Church: Shorter Works, will be available in the summer of 2021. This series, to be printed only in paperback format, will offer English translations of treatises, homilies, poems, and letters of the Church Fathers in slim, easily affordable volumes. In this way a multitude of important writings will become accessible to scholars and students as well as the reading public. This is the first complete English translation of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise On the Six Days of Creation (In Hexaemeron). It was probably written in 380-381, and is designed as both a defense and a critique of his recently deceased brother St. Basil’s better known homilies on the creation story as set out in the first chapter of Genesis. At the same time it incorporates Gregory’s own observations on the Genesis text, which reflect his desire to show the consistency between Scripture and the philosophy and natural science of his day A notable feature is Gregory’s presentation of God’s creation of the world as what has been called a “substantification” of God’s own will, creatio ex Deo rather than creatio ex nihilo. Other ideas of his seem interestingly to foreshadow those of modern science, notably his challenge to the idea that matter is a primary ontological category and his theory that the world as we know it developed through a process of “sequence” (akolouthia) from an originally simultaneous creation of everything. Gregory differs from Basil in maintaining that the “waters above the firmament” in Genesis 1 are spiritual rather than physical in nature. He uses a modified form of Aristotle’s theory of elements, together with some interesting observations on geography and meteorology, to construct a detailed and ingenious account of the “water cycle.” This description enables him to refute Basil’s notion that there needs to be an extra supply of physical water above the firmament so that the water lost from earthly seas and rivers through evaporation can be “topped up.”

The selection from Capreolus's work represented in this translation shows him defending Aquinas's conclusions on faith, hope, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the virtues against such adversaries.

By treating Augustine's passages on deification both chronologically and constructively, Meconi situates Augustine in a long chorus of Christian pastors and theologians who understand the essence of Christianity as the human person's total and transformative union with God.

This book provides a fundamental introduction to Aquinas's theology of the One Creator God. Aimed at making that thought accessible to contemporary audiences, it gives a basic explanation of his theology while showing its compatibility with contemporary science and its relevance to current theological issues. Opening with a brief account of Aquinas’s life, it then describes the purpose and nature of the Summa Theologica and gives a short review of current varieties of Thomism. Without neglecting other works, it then focuses primarily on the discussion of the One God in the first part of the Summa Theologica. God's transcendence and immanence is a recurrent theme in that discussion. Evidence of God's immanent causality in the natural world grounds Aquinas's five arguments for the existence of God (the Five Ways) which then open onto God's transcendence. The subsequent discussion of the divine attributes builds on the modes of God's causality established in the Five Ways. It also shows the need for a language of analogy to preserve God's transcendence and prevent us from reducing God to the level of creatures, even as qualities such as "goodness" and "love," which we first know from creatures, are applied to God. The discussion of God's providence and governance establishes that the transcendent Creator God is most intimately present in creation. God acts in all creatures in a way that does not diminish their proper causality, but is rather its source. As there is no contradiction between God's transcendence and immanence, so there is no competition between the primary causality of God and the secondary causality of creatures. Empirical science, which is limited by its method to the secondary causality of creatures, is shown to be compatible with the broader discipline of theology which also embraces the primary causality of the Creator.

This collection originated in the centenary celebration of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. Written by acknowledged experts in their fields, the essays provide a unique overview of philosophical developments in the twentieth century. The broad range of topics considered makes the book an invaluable reference work.

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world. First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

The One, the Many, and the Trinity analyzes perhaps the most ambitious and robust system of process thought developed from a Roman Catholic perspective, that of Joseph A. Bracken,

The One Thomas More carefully studies the central humanist and polemical texts written by More to illustrate a coherent development of thought.

The study of the vocabulary of the Catholic religion may be taken as a definition of the liberal arts. Origins of Catholic Words is a work of reference organized like a lexicon or encyclopedia. There is an entry for each word of importance having to do with the Catholic Church. Anthony Lo Bello gives the etymology of the word, describes what it means, and then adds whatever further discussion he feels is needed; in some cases this amounts to several pages. Lo Bello has assembled, over a number of years, lucid and wide-ranging remarks on the etymology and history of the words that occur in the study of the Catholic religion. A true labor of love, this sophisticated, one-of-a-kind dictionary will delight those who take pleasure in learning. Anyone interested in words and language—indeed, in culture, will find something interesting on every page. This is a book one may read and not just consult. The author has been ecumenical in his choice of authorities. J. B. Bury, Lord Chesterfield, Mandell Creighton, S. R. Driver, Ferdinand Gregorovius, Dr. Johnson, Henry Charles Lea, Bishop Lightfoot, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Henry Hart Milman, Leopold von Ranke, and Bertrand Russell find their places alongside Alban Butler, Denzinger, Ignaz Döllinger the Abbé Duchesne, Adrian Fortescue, Bishop Hefele, Cardinal Gasparri, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Msgr. Horace K. Mann, John Henry Newman, Ludwig von Pastor, Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward, and Evelyn Waugh. There have been many changes in the Catholic Church since 1962, and one of the goals of this book is to describe what will soon be missing from the memories of all living people. Origins of Catholic Words may, Lo Bello hopes, make its small contribution so that the situation not arise, which would convict Newman of error when he wrote, “What the Catholic Church once has had, she never has lost.”

In The Orphans of Byzantium, Miller provides a perceptive and original study of the evolution of orphanages in the Byzantine Empire.

From the first encounter with the Latin language to its full presentation, the objective of Ossa Latinitatis Sola is to get people into immediate contact with and understanding of Latin authors, and for these encounters to grow into a love and use of the entire language in all its literary types and periods of time and authors of the past 2,300 years.

Ossa Ostensa is the world’s first comprehensive example of how to teach and learn the Latin language using the unique teaching system of the internationally recognized authority Reginald Foster. Laura Pooley – prize-winning graduate of the University of Oxford and currently a supervisor at the University of Cambridge, brings to life the year she spent in Rome studying Latin with Reginaldus. His inspiring and transformative method of teaching combines with Laura’s twenty years of teaching experience to produce concise and crystal-clear explanations of the language. The three ‘experiences’ of Latin: beginners, intermediates and advanced, are divided between three user-friendly workbooks. Each workbook comprises around thirty lessons, where the language is presented in hand-out form requiring very little modification by prospective teachers. Each language area is then illustrated by translated reading examples. After each lesson, Laura provides translation practice targeted to the taught content. These Latin passages are divided into Classical and Post-Classical literature, to appeal to the interests of all Latin students. Not only that, but each passage is accompanied by teaching questions and translation hints, the mainstay of Reginaldus’ classroom persona and pedagogy so famously encapsulated in his Ludi. Students therefore can exercise recent language content and develop deep and spontaneous fluency in the Latin language. Enjoy continuing your experience of learning with Reginaldus with book 2 of the Ossa Ostensa series, where the significant language areas of participles and subjunctives are met for the first time.

Ossa Ostensa is the world’s first comprehensive example of how to teach and learn the Latin language using the unique teaching system of the internationally recognized authority Reginald Foster. Laura Pooley – prize-winning graduate of the University of Oxford and currently a supervisor at the University of Cambridge, brings to life the year she spent in Rome studying Latin with Reginaldus. His inspiring and transformative method of teaching combines with Laura’s twenty years of teaching experience to produce concise and crystal-clear explanations of the language. The three ‘experiences’ of Latin: beginners, intermediates and advanced, are divided between three user-friendly workbooks. Each workbook comprises around thirty lessons, where the language is presented in hand-out form requiring very little modification by prospective teachers. Each language area is then illustrated by translated reading examples. After each lesson, Laura provides translation practice targeted to the taught content. These Latin passages are divided into Classical and Post-Classical literature, to appeal to the interests of all Latin students. Not only that, but each passage is accompanied by teaching questions and translation hints, the mainstay of Reginaldus’ classroom persona and pedagogy so famously encapsulated in his Ludi. Students therefore can exercise recent language content and develop deep and spontaneous fluency in the Latin language. For the first time, the experience of learning with Reginaldus is available to everyone.

Beginners and experts alike will find a complete immersion into the workings and nature of the Latin language embodied in the incomparable, insuperable epistles of the great Marcus Tullius Cicero, something which other commentators pass over or scorn. This second volume puts “meat on the bones” of the Latin language presented in the first volume: Ossa Latinitatis Sola: The Mere Bones of Latin. The personal letters of Cicero provide ample meat to enflesh the skeletal structure of the language, thus the title: Ossium Carnes Multae: The Bones’ Meats Abundant from the epistles of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Part 1 presents 51 complete letters from the Tyrell-Purser text. Facing each letter is an image of its oldest manuscript edition as early as the ninth century, which are preserved and guarded in the Medicea Laurentiana library in Florence, Italy, witnessing to the human hand preserving this monument of world heritage for over two millennia. Part 2 follows with a most careful rendition into English of Tully’s living, telephone-like Latin discourse. A thorough treatment and explanation of noteworthy elements of his natural talk follows with numerous references to the Encounters in Volume I. All this has students, learners, teachers, experts of the Latin language in mind and is humbly designed to deepen the understanding and appreciation of specific expressions and peculiarities of Cicero’s language itself. Part 3 provides 500 sentences consisting of from 1 to 5 words and suited for the beginnings or continuation of Latin conversations: 200 declarations, 100 questions, 100 exclamations, 100 injunctions drawn from his letters. The volume is amply indexed. All this has been done to enhance the study and use of Latin, to popularize Cicero’s correspondence, to prepare the reader for Volume III which will deal again with the letters and their usefulness for Latin conversation.

Many people believe that when it comes to moral questions, anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's. Teachers of philosophy, by exposing students to the full panoply of moral theory, can reinforce this prejudice towards skepticism even when they intend to challenge it. Gary Michael Atkinson has taught introductory courses in philosophy for decades, and he has developed an effective approach to show that widespread skepticism based on the existence of persistent moral disagreement is mistaken. Our Search with Socrates for Moral Truth will appeal not only to students and teachers of philosophy but to any educated reader seeking to ascertain or defend the existence of moral truth.

Following the tradition of the great literary quarterlies, the journal discussed every aspect of human endeavor, and Out of Due Time offers a fine opportunity to view the best of the Catholic mind in an extraordinary period.