Books in the Catholic Ideas for a Secular World series

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.

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.

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.