How are we to read the Gospels and bring them into our lives? The idea of this book is that the Gospels are not merely rules for life, or stories illustrating moral lessons, or statements of theological doctrine, but invitations to thought and conversation. The Gospels are full of problems, uncertainties, and tensions; these difficulties call upon us to engage with the Gospels in a new way: to read them, to ask questions about them, to live with them, alone and together. The way we do that...

How can we connect the Gospels--the fundamental texts of Christian faith--to our own experience of inner and outer life? This is the question that animates Connecting to the Gospel. In it James Boyd White presents a series of Gospel passages, together with the sermons he gave on these passages as a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, with brief commentaries and questions on each as well. The whole is designed as an aid to thought and reflection about the issues raised by the Gospel passa...

St. Augustine’s Confessions is heralded as a classic of Western culture. Yet when James Boyd White first tried to read it in translation, it seemed utterly dull. Its ideas struck him as platitudinous and its prose felt drab. It was only when he started to read the text in Latin that he began to see the originality and depth of Augustine’s work.In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in w...

St. Augustine’s Confessions is heralded as a classic of Western culture. Yet when James Boyd White first tried to read it in translation, it seemed utterly dull. Its ideas struck him as platitudinous and its prose felt drab. It was only when he started to read the text in Latin that he began to see the originality and depth of Augustine’s work.In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in w...

The authors of this book share a concern for the state of law and democracy in our country, which to many seems to have deteriorated badly. Deep changes are visible in a wide array of phenomena: judicial opinions, the teaching of law, legal practice, international relations, legal scholarship, congressional deliberations, and the culture of contemporary politics. In each of these intersections between law, culture, and politics, traditional expectations have been transformed in ways that p...

Through fresh readings of texts ranging from Homer's Iliad, Swift's Tale of a Tub, and Austen's Emma through the United States Constitution and McCulloch v. Maryland, James Boyd White examines the relationship between an individual mind and its language and culture as well as the "textual community" established between writer and audience. These striking textual analyses develop a rhetoric—a "way of reading" that can be brought to any text but that, in b...

Language is our key to imagining the world, others, and ourselves. Yet sometimes our ways of talking dehumanize others and trivialize human experience. In war other people are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies those it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. Advertising reduces us to consumers, and clichés destroy the life of the imagination.How are we to assert our humanity and that of others against the forces in the culture and in our own min...

In Ethics: The Essential Writings,** philosopher Gordon Marino skillfully presents an accessible, provocative anthology of both ancient and modern classics on matters moral. The philosophers represent 2,500 years of thought—from Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche to Alasdair MacIntyre, Susan Wolf, and Peter Singer—and cover a broad range of topics, from the timeless questions of justice, morality, and faith to the hot-button concerns of today, such as animal rights, our duties to...

Time magazine called Mortimer J. Adler a "philosopher for everyman." In this guide to considering the big questions, Adler addresses the topics all men and women ponder in the course of life, such as "What is love?", "How do we decide the right thing to do?", and, "What does it mean to be good?" Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Western literature, history, and philosophy, the author considers what is meant by democracy, law, emotion, language, truth, and other abstract concepts in lig...

This enlightening study is the result of group discussions at Dr. Adler's annual seminar in Aspen, Colorado, and conversations between Dr. Adler and Bill moyers filmed for public television.Each summer, Mortimer J. Adler conducts a seminar at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. At the 1981 seminar, leaders from the worlds of business, literature, education, and the arts joined him in an in-depth consideration of the six great ideas that are the subject of this book: T...

Stimulating, engaging, and organized in an easy-to-use, A-to-Z format, Adler's Philosophical Dictionary is an ideal introduction to the history of the great ideas.The terms and concepts that have simulated thinkers from Aristotle onward come to life in the latest work by the man TIME magazine has called "America's philosopher for everyman." Is the human soul immortal? What does it mean to know something? What is the nature of erotic love? Adler ex...

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 ventur...