Describing the political effects of Original Sin, Professor Budziszewski shows how man's suppression of his knowledge of right and wrong corrupts his conscience and accelerates social collapse. The depraved conscience grasps at the illusion of "moral neutrality," the absurd notion that men live together without a shared understanding of how things are. After evaluating the political devices, including the American Constitution, by which men have tried in the past to work around the effects of Original Sin, Dr. Budziszewski elucidates the pitfalls of contemporary communitarianism, liberalism, and conservatism.
J. Budziszewski presents and defends the natural-law tradition by expounding the work of leading architects of the theory, including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke.
Sherry Hoppe tells the story of her love for and the mystery surrounding her husband Bobby Hoppe, a hometown football hero with a dark secret from his past.
Professor J. Budziszewski questions the modern assumption that moral truths are unknowable. With clear and logical arguments he rehabilitates the natural law tradition and restores confidence in a moral code based upon human nature. --from publisher description.
Ressentiment—the hateful desire for revenge—plays a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Ressentiment explains the formation of bad conscience, guilt, asceticism, and, most importantly, it motivates the "slave revolt" that gives rise to Western morality’s values. Ressentiment, however, has not enjoyed a thorough treatment in the secondary literature. This book brings it sharply into focus and provides the first detailed examination of Nietzsche’s psychology of ressentiment. Unlike other books on the Genealogy, it uses ressentiment as a key to the Genealogy and focuses on the intriguing relationship between ressentiment and justice. It shows how ressentiment, despite its blindness to justice, gives rise to moral justice—the central target of Nietzsche’s critique. This critique notwithstanding, the Genealogy shows Nietzsche’s enduring commitment to the virtue of non-moral justice: a commitment that grounds his provocative view that moral justice spells the ‘end of justice’. The result provides a novel view of Nietzsche's moral psychology in the Genealogy, his critique of morality, and his views on justice.
The suicidal proclivity of our time, writes the acclaimed philosopher J. Budziszewski, is to deny the obvious. Our hearts are riddled with desires that oppose their deepest longings, because we demand to have happiness on terms that make happiness impossible. Why? And what can we do about it? Budziszewski addresses these vital questions in his brilliantly persuasive new book, The Line Through the Heart. The answers can be discovered in an exploration of natural law—a venture that, with Budziszewski as our expert guide, takes us through politics, religion, ethics, law, philosophy, and more. Natural law, the author states plainly but provocatively, is a fact about human beings; as surely as we have hands and feet, we have the foundational principles of good and evil woven into the fabric of our minds. From this elemental fact emerges a natural law theory that unfolds as part of a careful study of the human person. Thus, Budziszewski shows, natural law forms a common ground for humanity. But this common ground is slippery. While natural law is truly an observable part of human nature, human beings are hell-bent—quite literally—on ignoring it. The mere mention of the obligations imposed on man by his nature will send him into a rage. In this sense, The Line Through the Heart explores natural law as not simply a fact and a theory but also a sign of contradiction. While investigating the natural law and its implications, Budziszewski boldly confronts—and offers a newly integrated view of—a wide range of contemporary issues, including abortion, evolution, euthanasia, capital punishment, the courts, and the ersatz state religion being built in the name of religious toleration. Written in Budziszewski’s usual crystalline style, The Line Through the Heart makes clear that natural law is a matter of concern not merely to scholars; it touches how each of us lives, and how all of us live together. His profoundly important examination of this subject helps us make sense of why habits that run against our nature have become second nature, and why our world seems to be going mad.
A historical novel of the Battle of Kings Mountain, South Carolina, a pivotal battle which took place in 1780 between loyalist and patriot forces during the American Revolutionary War.
Conscience: Phenomena and Theories was first published in German in 1925 as a dissertation by Hendrik G. Stoker under the title Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien. It was received with acclaim by philosophers at the time, including Stoker’s dissertation mentor Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Spielberg, as quite possibly the single most comprehensive philosophical treatment of conscience and as a major contribution in the phenomenological tradition. Stoker’s study offers a detailed historical survey of the concept of conscience from ancient times through the Middle Ages up to more modern thinkers, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Cardinal Newman. Stoker analyzes not only the concept of conscience in academic theory but also various types of theories of conscience. His work offers insightful discussions of problems and theories related to the genesis, reliability, and validity of conscience. In particular, Stoker analyzes the moral, spiritual, and psychological phenomena connected with bad conscience, which in turn illuminate the concept of conscience. The book is deeply informed by the traditions of western Christianity. Available for the first time in an accessible English translation, with an introduction by its translator and editor, Philip E. Blosser, it promises to be of interest to philosophers, especially in Christian philosophy and phenomenology, and also to all those interested in moral and religious psychology, ethics, religion, and theology.
