Books

John Henry Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times

Fellow Reinhard Hütter’s main thesis is that Saint John Henry Newman, in his own context of the nineteenth century, faced the same challenges that we do today: liberalism in religion, rationalism, and the unfettered reign of private judgment in matters of religion. Newman’s engagement with these problems offers a prescient and prophetic diagnosis of where these problems lead ― consequences which have more or less come to pass ― and an alternative which is at once thoroughly Catholic and deeply relevant.

The Author

Reinhard Hütter

Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?

In this timely book, IHE Fellow Catherine R. Pakaluk and Trent Horn argue that socialism is incompatible with Catholic teaching. Firmly rooted in Scripture, history, Catholic social teaching, and economics, they debunk claims that socialism is a Christian approach to government. They also clearly lay out commonsense economic principles that are truly in line with the Faith. Readers will be equipped to point out the fatal flaws of Socialism and participate in a call for the renewal of society founded in human freedom.

The Author

Trent Horn and Catherine R. Pakaluk

I Served A Saint

What is it like to work everyday in the presence of a saint? In his book I Served a Saint, Mario Enzler shares his true and fascinating experience as a Swiss Guard for St. John Paul II. While he currently serves as a Fellow for the Institute of Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, higher education was not his original plan. Also a former Musician and Tax Fiduciary, Enzler shares the dramatic and delightful journey of a layman and a Pope, each on the quest to know, love and serve God. How their paths cross is a story only God could dream up; Enzler was blessed enough to live it and write it down.

The Author

Mario Enzler

Eat, Fast, Feast: Heal Your Body While Feeding Your Soul―A Christian Guide to Fasting

Professor Jay Richards argues that Christians should recover the fasting lifestyle, not only to improve our bodies, but to bolster our spiritual health as well. In Eat, Fast, Feast, he combines forgotten spiritual wisdom on fasting and feasting with the burgeoning literature on ketogenic diets and fasting for improved physical and mental health. Based on his popular series “Fasting, Body and Soul” in The Stream, Eat, Fast, Feast explores what it means to substitute our hunger for God for our hunger for food, and what both modern science and the ancient monastics can teach us about this practice.

The Author

Professor Jay Richards, Ph.D.

The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, both secular and Catholic leaders assumed that the Church and the modern world were locked in a battle to the death. The triumph of modernity would not only finish the Church as a consequential player in world history; it would also lead to the death of religious conviction. But today, the Catholic Church is far more vital and consequential than it was 150 years ago. Ironically, in confronting modernity, the Catholic Church rediscovered its evangelical essence. In the process, Catholicism developed intellectual tools capable of rescuing the imperiled modern project. 

A richly rendered, deeply learned, and powerfully argued account of two centuries of profound change in the church and the world, The Irony of Modern Catholic History reveals how Catholicism offers twenty-first century essential truths for our survival and flourishing.

The Author

George Weigel

When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment

Can a boy be “trapped” in a girl’s body? Can modern medicine “reassign” sex? Is our sex “assigned” to us in the first place? What is the most loving response to a person experiencing a conflicted sense of gender? What should our law say on matters of “gender identity”? When Harry Became Sally provides thoughtful answers to questions arising from our transgender moment. Drawing on the best insights from biology, psychology, and philosophy, Ryan Anderson offers a nuanced view of human embodiment, a balanced approach to public policy on gender identity, and a sober assessment of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.

The Author

Ryan T. Anderson

Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases under Scrutiny

This book, co-edited by IHE Fellow and Human Rights Program Director William Saunders, J.D., presents a collection of studies by top scholars (including Saunders himself, Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame, and William Binchy of Ireland) on leading cases from twelve different countries defining the legal ‘status’ of unborn human life. The cases under study pertain to three distinctive cultural and constitutional systems: Latin American Constitutional Courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, European Constitutional Courts and the European Court on Human Rights, as well as Common Law jurisdictions. With a special conclusion by Professor John Finnis, drawing together the many treads of the individual chapters into a comprehensive whole, this book lays the basis for further comparative study of the legal and moral reasoning underlying judicial decisions which either recognize or deny legal personhood and/or equal dignity to unborn human beings.

The Author

William L. Saunders and Pilar Zambrano

Science and Christian Ethics

There is a growing crisis in scientific research characterized by failures to reproduce experimental results, fraud, lack of innovation, and burn-out. In Science and Christian Ethics, Paul Scherz traces these problems to the drive by governments and business to make scientists into competitive entrepreneurs who use their research results to stimulate economic growth. The result is a competitive environment aimed at commodifying the world. In order to confront this problem of character, Scherz examines the alternative Aristotelian and Stoic models of reforming character, found in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michel Foucault. Against many prominent virtue ethicists, he argues that what individual scientists need is a regime of spiritual exercises, such as those found in Stoicism as it was adopted by Christianity, in order to refocus on the good of truth in the face of institutional pressure. His book illuminates pressing issues in research ethics, moral education, and anthropology.

The Author

Paul Scherz

Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South

Mercenaries and Missionaries examines the relationship between rapidly diffusing forms of capitalism and Christianity in the Global South. Using more than two hundred interviews in Bangalore and Dubai, Brandon Vaidyanathan explains how and why global corporate professionals straddle conflicting moral orientations in the realms of work and religion. Seeking to place the spotlight on the role of religion in debates about the cultural consequences of capitalism, Vaidyanathan finds that an “apprehensive individualism” generated in global corporate workplaces is supported and sustained by a “therapeutic individualism” cultivated in evangelical-charismatic Catholicism.

The Author

Brandon Vaidyanathan

Bound for Beatitude: A Thomistic Study in Eschatology and Ethics (Thomistic Ressourcement Series)

Bound for Beatitude by IHE Fellow Reinhard Hutter is about Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology of beatitude and the journey thereto. Consequently, the work’s topic is the meaning and purpose of human life embedded in the whole cosmos with a focus on the final end of human life, the attainment of perfect and everlasting happiness. This study is not an antiquarian exercise in the thought of some sundry medieval thinker, but an exercise of ressourcement in the philosophical and theological wisdom of one of the most profound theologians of the Catholic Church, one whom the Church has canonized, granted the title “Doctor of the Church,” and for a long time regarded as the common doctor. This book aims at the very heart of the philosophical and theological vision of Thomas Aquinas and simultaneously at the very heart of the vocation of being human and the goal of this journey–the attainment of beatitude.

The Author

Reinhard Hütter

Aquinas on Transubstantiation: The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist (Thomistic Ressourcement Series)

Aquinas on Transubstantiation treats one of the most frequently mis-understood and mis-represented teachings of Thomas Aquinas―Eucharistic transubstantiation. The study interprets Aquinas’s teaching as an exercise of “holy teaching” (sacra doctrina) that intends to show theologically and back up philosophically the simple yet profound thesis that “transubstantiation” affirms nothing but the truth of Christ’s words at the Last Supper―”This is my body,” “This is my blood.” Yet in order to achieve a contemporary ressourcement of this simple yet profound truth, it is necessary to probe the depths of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical interpretation of it.

The Author

Reinhard Hütter

The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark

This new translation of the Gospel of Mark reveals startling nuances and idiosyncracies in the original Greek text that have traditionally been camoflauged by English translations. IHE Fellow Dr. Michael Pakaluk, who previously translated Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics for Oxford, presents his new translation alongside a fascinating commentary that draws forth new meaning and context about the Gospel, which is long understood to be Mark’s retelling of what St. Peter told him first-hand.

The Author

Michael Pakaluk

The Literary Reagan: Authentic Quotations from His Life

This collection of authentic quotations of Ronald Reagan will appeal to all those interested in the former US President, and who seek to understand more about his beliefs and the inner man. For many Americans conservatives and liberals alike, students and historians, concerned citizens and politicians, Reagan remains a major figure whose legacy still influences political and cultural debates over many core issues, especially those concerning the role, reach, and power of government. Based on Reagan’s own sayings, writings, letters, and essays, not those of aides and speech writers, this work provides the only comprehensive collection of the man’s own thinking on a full spectrum of relevant topics over his long life. It brings together over 1,500 quotations arranged alphabetically into 64 thematic categories. Most are serious — the Cold War, Communism, Federalism, Foreign Policy, the State — yet some illustrate Reagan the man: Curses, Humor in Adversity, Toasts, and even a small section on Wine.

The Author

Nicholas Dujmovic

Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome

In a series of fascinating interviews, a cradle Catholic (Robert P. George) and an adult convert (R. J. Snell), offer the stories of sixteen converts, one of which is IHE Fellow Chad Pecknold, each a public intellectual or leading voice in their respective fields, and each making a significant contribution to the life of the Church.

Mind, Heart, and Soul is a Surprised by Truth for a new generation. It will reinvigorate the faith of Catholics and answer questions or address hurdles those discerning entering the Church may have…by people have had the same questions and the same road.

While some of the converts are well-known, their stories are not. Here they speak for themselves, providing the reasons for belief that prompted these accomplished men and women to embrace the ancient faith.

Included are interviews with a bishop, a leading theologian and priest, a member of the International Theological Commission, a former megachurch pastor, a prominent pro-life scholar, professors from Harvard and other universities, as well as journalists and writers, novelists and scholars. Each are interviewed by another leading scholar, many of whom are themselves converts and familiar with the hesitations, anxieties, discoveries, and hopes of those who discover the Faith.

These conversion stories remind us that the Catholic Church retains her vitality, able to provide answers and reasons for hope to new generations of believers, always sustained by the Holy Spirit. It is all too-easy to become discouraged in our day and age, but God never fails to call people to Himself, as evidenced by these remarkable stories.

The Author

Robert P. George and R. J. Snell

Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy

Economists and theologians usually inhabit different intellectual worlds. Economists investigate the workings of markets and tend to set ethical questions aside. Theologians, anxious to take up concerns raised by market outcomes, often dismiss economics and lose insights into the influence of market incentives on individual behavior. Mary L. Hirschfeld, who was a professor of economics for fifteen years before training as a theologian, seeks to bridge these two fields in this innovative work about economics and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.

According to Hirschfeld, an economics rooted in Thomistic thought integrates many of the insights of economists with a larger view of the good life, and gives us critical purchase on the ethical shortcomings of modern capitalism. In a Thomistic approach, she writes, ethics and economics cannot be reconciled if we begin with narrow questions about fair wages or the acceptability of usury. Rather, we must begin with an understanding of how economic life serves human happiness. The key point is that material wealth is an instrumental good, valuable only to the extent that it allows people to flourish. Hirschfeld uses that insight to develop an account of a genuinely humane economy in which pragmatic and material concerns matter but the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is not the ultimate goal.

The Thomistic economics that Hirschfeld outlines is thus capable of dealing with our culture as it is, while still offering direction about how we might make the economy better serve the human good.

The Author

Mary L. Hirschfeld

The Essence of Entrepreneurship and the Nature and Significance of Market Process

The Essence of Entrepreneurship and the Nature and Significance of Market Process is a continuation of the discourse started in Kirzner’s earlier work, Competition and Entrepreneurship, expanding upon his ideas about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial alertness. Essence presents most of the detailed research Kirzner has done on the nature of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial process in the decades following the publication of his magnum opus. It is during that long period that Kirzner elaborated his approach further, responding to objections and critics, and offering the world a more systematic understanding of the concept of market process.

In the words of the volume editors and in contrast with traditional microeconomics, “Kirzner’s view of the entrepreneurial function in the market process consists primarily in liberating human choice from its deterministic structure by introducing alertness. Alertness to unexploited gains from trade sets the market process in motion.” Hence, Kirzner holds a unique place among authors on entrepreneurship theory because of the way he focuses on the essence of the phenomenon at stake and its importance in the market process.

The Author

Edited by Peter J. Boettke and Frédéric Sautet

Return of the Barbarians: Confronting Non-State Actors from Ancient Rome to the Present

Barbarians are back. These small, highly mobile, and stateless groups are no longer confined to the pages of history; they are a contemporary reality in groups such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIL. Return of the Barbarians re-examines the threat of violent non-state actors throughout history, revealing key lessons that are applicable today. From the Roman Empire and its barbarian challenge on the Danube and Rhine, Russia and the steppes to the nineteenth-century Comanches, Jakub J. Grygiel shows how these groups have presented peculiar, long-term problems that could rarely be solved with a finite war or clearly demarcated diplomacy. To succeed and survive, states were often forced to alter their own internal structure, giving greater power and responsibility to the communities most directly affected by the barbarian menace.

Understanding the barbarian challenge, and strategies employed to confront it, offers new insights into the contemporary security threats facing the Western world.

The Author

Jakub J. Grygiel

The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines

For two and a half centuries, America has been held together by the belief that if you work hard and conduct yourself responsibly in this country, you will be able to prosper and leave a better life for your children. But over the past decade, that idea has come into crisis. A recession, the mass outsourcing of stable jobs, and a coming wave of automation that will replace millions of blue- and white-collar jobs alike have left many people worried that the game is rigged and that our best days are behind us.

In this story-driven manifesto on the future of American work, IHE Fellow Jay Richards argues that such thinking is counterproductive—making us more fragile, more dependent, and less equipped to succeed in a rapidly changing economy. If we’re going to survive, we need a new model for how ordinary people can thrive in this age of mass disruption. Richards pulls back the curtain on what’s really happening in our economy, dispatching myths about capitalism, greed, and upward mobility. And he tells the stories of how real individuals have begun to rebuild a culture of virtue, capitalizing on the skills that are most uniquely human: creativity, resilience, and empathy for the needs of others.

Destined to take its place alongside classics like Economics in One Lesson, The Human Advantage is the essential book for understanding the future of American work, and how each of us can make this era of staggering change work on our behalf.

The Author

Jay W. Richards

Deconstructing the Administrative State

This book discusses a battle of ideologies that has lasted over a century and continues today, pitting those who defend the American Experiment and the constitutional structure against those who seek to replace that structure with one that empowers them to implement their ideas with little or no popular input. Progressives want governance by experts – bureaucrats with administrative power to make political judgments on how people must live, thereby narrowing the realm of their liberty. They expand the administrative state and create an identity of interest with Big Business. Both groups want an ever-expanding government: one motivated by power, the other by money. For its part, Big Business has set up camp on Capitol Hill, lavishly funding establishment politicians, of both parties, who rationalize the need for campaign money to the detriment of waging the good fight. Together, politicians and their cronies elbow the citizen off the policy-making stage. However, this state of affairs is kindling the passions of the constitutional structure’s greatest “check” on government excess – the American people. This is a fight that can be won.

The Author

Emmett McGroarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle

Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II

George Weigel tells the story of his unique friendship with Saint John Paul II. The book provides a fascinating account of the tumult of post-Vatican II Catholicism and the Cold War’s endgame, introducing readers to the heroes who brought down European communism. Later, it shows us the aging pope grappling with the post-9/11 world order and teaching new lessons in dignity through his own suffering.

A deeply humane portrait of an eminent scholar learning a saint, Lessons in Hope is essential reading for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of a world-changing pope.

The Author

George Weigel

Love First: Toward a Christian Humanism

The study of man today is divided in three ways that it should not be: between the humanities and the social sciences, between natural and metaphysical philosophy, and between faith and reason. This book bridges these three divides to build toward an integrated understanding of human being that begins with the revealed truths of Christian faith. Because its humanism draws upon diverse fields of art, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology, the book should be of interest to scholars and students of all kinds. And because its humanism is all about us, the book should be of interest to anyone who happens to be human.

The Author

Lloyd E. Sandelands

Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

Virtually everyone supports religious liberty, and virtually everyone opposes discrimination. But how do we handle the hard questions that arise when exercises of religious liberty seem to discriminate unjustly? How do we promote the common good while respecting conscience in a diverse society? This point-counterpoint book brings together leading voices in the culture wars to debate such questions: John Corvino, a longtime LGBT-rights advocate, opposite Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis, prominent young social conservatives.

The Author

Ryan T. Anderson with John Corvino and Sherif Girgis

A Chair for Pope Francis: A Collection of Designs for the Papal Sanctuary and Charrette

It was destined for an event that was not only historic and public, but also sacred. The design was tasked to be temporary yet permanent and humble yet noble. Deliverables included plans, elevations, D digital and physical models, and a prayer to win.

In April 2015, the Archdiocese of Washington DC solicited design entries from the students of The Catholic University of America for the furniture of Pope Francis’ Mass during His visit to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The central focus was the chair, ambo, and altar; timeless pieces were desired. In addition to being visually, artistically, and architecturally consistent and compliant to Catholic liturgy, practical considerations such as the need to transport, assemble, and dismantle design elements in a short period of time were pivotal design requests. This book is a collection of works submitted for the Papal Sanctuary Charrette Competition.

The Author

Patricia Andrasik

A Catechism for Business: Tough Ethical Questions and Insights from Catholic Teaching

A Catechism for Business presents the teachings of the Catholic Church as they relate to more than one hundred specific and challenging moral questions as they have been asked by business leaders. Andrew V. Abela and Joseph E. Capizzi have assembled the relevant quotations from recent Catholic social teaching as responses to these questions.

Questions and answers are grouped together under major topics such as marketing, finance, and investment. The book’s easy-to-use question and answer approach invites quick reference for tough questions and serves as a basis for reflection and deeper study in the rich Catholic tradition of social doctrine.

This second edition includes material from Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, and his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium.

The Editors

Andrew V. Abela and Joseph E. Capizzi

Wealth of Persons: Economics With a Human Face

Wealth of Persons: Economics With a Human Face

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century initiated a great debate not just about inequality but also regarding the failures found in the economic models used by theoreticians and practitioners alike. Wealth of Persons offers a totally different perspective that challenges the very terms of the debate. The Great Recession reveals a great existential rift at the core of certain economic reflections, thereby showing the real crisis of the crisis of economics. In the human sciences we have created a kind of “Tower of Babel” where we cannot understand each other any longer. The “breakdowns” occur equally on the personal, social, political, and economic levels. There is a need for an “about-face” in method to restore harmony among dissociated disciplines. Wealth of Persons offers a key to such a restoration, applying insights and analysis taken from different economic scholars, schools of thought, philosophical traditions, various disciplines, and charismatic entrepreneurs. Wealth of Persons aims at recapturing an adequate understanding of the acting human person in the economic drama, one that measures up to the reality. The investigation is a passport allowing entry into the land of economic knowledge, properly unfolding the anthropological meaning of the free economy.

The Author

John McNerney

Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom

Pope Paul VI characterized the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom — Dignitatis Humanae — as one of the greatest documents of Vatican II. It is also perhaps the most intensely debated document of the Council; both the drafting of the Declaration of Religious Freedom and its reception have been marked by deep disagreements about what this teaching means for the Church.

In this book David Schindler and Nicholas Healy promote a deeper understanding of this important document. In addition to presenting a new translation of the approved text of the Declaration, Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity makes available for the first time in English the five drafts of the document that were presented to the Council bishops leading up to the final version. The book also includes an original interpretive essay on Dignitatis Humanae by Schindler and an essay on the genesis and redaction history of the text by Healy.

The Author

David L. Schindler and Nicholas Healy

Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare

The just war ethic emerges from an affirmative response to the basic question of whether people may sometimes permissibly intend to kill other people.

In Politics, Justice, and War, Joseph E. Capizzi clarifies the meaning and coherence of the “just war” approach, to the use of force in the context of Christian ethics. By reconnecting the just war ethic to an Augustinian political approach, Capizzi illustrates that the just war ethic requires emphasis on the “right intention,” or goal, of peace as ordered justice. With peace set as the goal of war, the various criteria of the just war ethic gain their intelligibility and help provide practical guidance to all levels of society regarding when to go to war and how to strive to contain it.

So conceived, the ethic places stringent limits on noncombatant or “innocent” killing in war, helps make sense of contemporary technological and strategic challenges, and opens up space for a critical and constructive dialogue with international law.

The Author

Joseph E. Capizzi

The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

Anyone who has read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can gather that their author hated tyranny, but few know that the novelist who once described himself as a hobbit “in all but size” was—even by hobbit standards—a zealous proponent of economic freedom and small government. There is a growing concern among many that the West is sliding into political, economic, and moral bankruptcy. In his beloved novels of Middle-Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien has drawn us a map to freedom.

The Author

Jay Richards with Jonathan Witt

A Reason Open to God: On Universities, Education, and Culture

With clarity and wisdom, Pope Benedict XVI sets out his vision for Catholic higher education in this first and only collection of his major addresses on the topic. What is the mission and identity of a Catholic university? What are the responsibilities of administrators, teachers, and students in Catholic institutes of higher learning? Where does the central theme of “love of God and others” fit into academia?

The Author

J. Steven Brown

The Pope & The CEO: John Paul II’s Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard

Andreas Widmer gives a behind-the-scenes look into Pope John Paul II and reveals how those memories shaped and forged his success as a corporate executive. In what papal biographer George Weigel calls a powerful example of leadership at work, Widmer recounts his personal experiences serving Saint John Paul II in the Swiss Guard, and the secrets of successful leadership that he learned at the feet of the great pope.

“John Paul II showed me what real leadership looks like. He modeled for me how to pursue our God-given potential. Not coincidentally, this also makes us and those around us better employees, more capable of and more willing to work hard at building a stronger company. That’s something that makes both good human sense and good business sense.” – Andreas Widmer Former Swiss Guard, CEO and business leader.

The Author

Andreas Widmer

Accounting Ethics

A book crammed with interesting case studies, anecdotes, illustrative examples, and historical reflections, Accounting Ethics is designed to bring home important insights and raise crucial questions such as the following: Did accounting irregularities help provoke the recent financial crisis? A profession and a business: How are they different? What character traits mark a good accounting professional? How did the founders of modern accounting view accountancy as a profession? What is the proper relationship between rules and principles? Can any erroneous ethical views negatively influence practice (e.g. relativism)? What are the proper meanings of independence , objectivity , and integrity ? The inherent altruism of accountancy as a profession Accounting Ethics continues the collaboration between a widely recognized expert in moral philosophy and a leading forensic accountant which was justly praised in Understanding Accounting Ethics, second edition.

The Author

Mark Cheffers and Michael Pakaluk