In Educating for Virtue, five scholars address one of the most pressing issues of our time: the relationship between education and the development of moral character. With Essays by Claes G. Ryn, Russell Kirk, Paul Gottfried, Peter J. Stanlis, Solveig Eggerz.

Editor Joseph Baldacchino is the President of the National Humanities Institute and Editor of the academic journal Humanitas. For many years he was a Washington reporter and editor, in which capacity he addressed most aspects of national policy and politics but with particular emphasis on ethical and cultural issues. Baldacchino is author of Economics and the Moral Order and, with others, Irving Babbitt in Our Time. His present writing project, with others, is a constitutional history of the United States entitled Who We Are: The Story of America’s Constitution.

From the Foreword:

“If there is a single thread that runs through these essays, it is the recognition of a universal order that transcends the flux of human life and gives meaning to it. Insofar as men act in accordance with this order, they experience true happiness and are brought into community with others who are similarly motivated. But men are afflicted with contrary impulses that are destructive of universal order. When acted upon, these impulses bring suffering and a sense of meaninglessness and despair; the result is disintegration and conflict–within both the personality and society at large. Yet so tempting are the attactions of these impulses that they frequently prevail and must be taken into account in any realistic assessment of human affairs. This tension within the person between competing desires–the conflict between what Plato called the One and the Many–is the ultimate reality of human experience. To apprehend this reality, and to act in the light of the transcendent purpose with appropriate reverence and restraint, is the essence of wisdom; and to help deepen and strengthen this apprehension–through philosophy, history, literature, and the arts and sciences–is the overarching purpose of any education worthy of the name.”

In this wide-ranging collection of essays on origins, mathematician Granville Sewell looks at the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, and the evolution of life.  He concludes that while there is much in the history of life that seems to suggest natural causes, there is nothing to support Charles Darwin’s idea that natural selection of random mutations can explain major evolutionary advances (“easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science,” he calls it).  Sewell explains why evolution is a fundamentally different and much more difficult problem than others solved by science, and why increasing numbers of scientists are now recognizing what has long been obvious to the layman, that there is no explanation possible without design. This book summarizes many of the traditional arguments for intelligent design, but presents some powerful new arguments as well.

Granville Sewell is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso.  He completed his PhD in Mathematics at Purdue University in 1972 and has worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, the University of Texas Center for High Performance Computing (Austin), and Texas A&M University.  He also spent one semester teaching at Universidad Nacional de Tucuman in Argentina on a Fullbright Scholarship.  Dr. Sewell has written three books on numerical analysis, and is the author of a widely-used finite element computer program.

What They Are Saying:

“As the debate over intelligent design grows increasingly heated, with critics engaging in vicious polemics, it is refreshing to find a discussion of the topic that is calm, thoughtful, and far-ranging, with no sense of having to advance an agenda or decimate the opposition. In this regard, Granville Sewell’s In the Beginning succeeds brilliantly.” — William A. Dembski, author of The Design Inference and The End of Christianity

English historian and Christian humanist Christopher Dawson stood at the very center of the Catholic literary and intellectual revival in the four decades preceding Vatican II. One can find his influence throughout the twentieth-century Catholic Right. Poet and social critic T. S. Eliot considered him the foremost thinker of his generation, and the founder of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote that he had been “saturated in Dawsonian historical studies [and] my own books reflect Dawson’s concepts.”

Dawson’s reputation declined dramatically during the cultural shifts accompanying Vatican II, and few remembered the English Catholic in the final decades of the twentieth century. A revival of interest of Dawson and his body of work increased dramatically in the last years of John Paul II’s and the beginning of Benedict’s pontificates. This book offers the first study of Dawson’s life and thought as a whole. It is especially poignant as a post–9/11 reexamination of the meaning of Western civilization.

Sanctifying the World was named by biographer Joseph Pearce as the best book of 2008 and the National Catholic Register named it one of the top eleven books of the year.

Bradley J. Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College and is the author of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth.

When it comes to some of life’s most profound questions—the origins of life, of matter, of the universe itself—does modern science already have everything all figured out? Many scientists would like us to think they are mere steps away from solving all the deep enigmas of physical existence.

Consummate skeptic David Berlinski shows that all such confidence is at best a bluff. In essays about evolution using humor and wit, Berlinski shows how lost today’s scientists really are. His new book The Deniable Darwin frees us from the superstition of preening scientism and illuminates the path to a renewal of real science.

In The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays Berlinski wields his famous skepticism excluding neither Darwinism nor intelligent design from his critical eye.  Included among the 32 essays spanning 15 years are his award winning essays “What Brings a World into Being?”, and “On the Origins of Mind” (Best American Science Writing 2002, 2005 respectively).

David Berlinski is a senior fellow in the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is the author of numerous books, including The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and It Scientific Pretensions (Basic Books 2009). Berlinski received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels. He has also taught philosophy, mathematics and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Université de Paris.

What They Are Saying:

“David Berlinski is to science writing what Tiger Woods is to golf. He can score from anywhere, against any opponent, on any course. The Deniable Darwin is a compulsive revel of his incandescent prose and jugular polemics. As irresistible as Gödel’s Proof.”—George Gilder author of The Israel Test, Wealth and Poverty, and Telecosm

“Berlinksi’s rapier wit is the antidote to the insufferable smugness of modern scientism. When, without any seeming effort, he notes that ‘like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgments are collective,’ the reader is forever immunized against grandiose claims for scientific ‘consensus.’ Much more awaits the readers of this wonderful collection.”—Michael Behe professor of biochemistry, Lehigh University, and author of The Edge of Evolution and Darwin’s Black Box

“David Berlinski’s ability to weave the lessons of history with the wonders of modern science is unmatched, as is his use of subtle humor that enlivens his text. These essays will delight many and annoy others, regardless of on which side of the ideological aisle of science you may stand—for science has an ideology as Berlinski so well documents.”—Gerald Schroeder author of God According to God: A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along and The Science of God

“Berlinski is a genuine intellectual hero, one whose challenge to the certainties of evolutionary biology and Big Bang cosmology–the comfortable certainties of conventional wisdom about the origin of man and the origin of the universe–does not come from allegiance to rival certainties such as biblical creationism. Instead, Berlinski turns the methods and assumptions of science on itself to demonstrate the implausibilities underlying the arrogant claims of the grand theorists.”—Ron Rosenbaum author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars