BOOK REVIEW: The Leaves are Green in Summer: Bite Size Philosophy (Chorabooks, 2019) by Jose Mario O. Mandia
Many people have all the reasons in the world not to study Catholic philosophy --- either on account of business or the complexity of the subject matter. They can worry no more, for thanks to Fr. Jose Mario Mandia’s The Leaves are Green in Summer: Bite Size Philosophy (Chorabooks, 2019), they can now avail of a solid introduction to Thomistic philosophy in concise, bite-sized chapters.
In simple and concise chapters The Leaves are Green in Summer explains the fundamentals of Thomistic Philosophy without sending heads into a spin, and with a fraction of the size and cost of a textbook: PHP 500 on Kindle, about PHP 1,000 on paperback (due to shipping costs).
The author is a priest of the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei who is currently based in Macau. The Leaves are Green in Summer is indeed a collation of articles published by the same author in the local Catholic newspaper of the Macau Diocese. Indeed, this work possesses a markedly apostolic character.
The author is also highly qualified to write about the subject matter, possessing a PhD in Philosophy from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross with a dissertation on naming, sense and reference.
With regard to the book itself, The Leaves are Green in Summer provides concise yet substantially solid introductions to the following: philosophical anthropology, logic, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of religion, and natural theology. It does all this while employing concrete examples and layman’s terms.
I believe that this book is a providential help to those who feel discouraged from drinking from the well-springs of Catholic philosophy due to its inscrutable depth. May they take courage in the fact that The Leaves are Green in Summer provides a way for them to dip their feet into the profound depths of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
You may buy the book in Amazon.
Daniel Tyler Chua is the founder and president of the Collegium Perulae Orientis. He is also a contributor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Sentinel PH.
