JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is a beautifully design object, and for a moment I thought that this might actually be a sympathetic-Communist pamphlet–something from the Paulist Press, for a Catholic high school system, and from 1936 when there were still plenty of Reds running around the U.S.–so I needed to look around the booklet a little bit. 

And of course I found out what it was really about just about instantly, and so there was no mistake about what the Passionate Father was really passionate about:

This is pretty strong stuff considering that Communists weren’t terribly uncommon in the U.S. half-way through the Depression, though that can be mostly due to the absence of the real story about what was going on in the Soviet Union under mega-murderer Joseph Stalin.  But really it is more the Socialists who were more popular in the off-party politics in America in the mid-’30’s.  In any event the author hit the Communists pretty hard based on their anti-god and anti-Catholic positions, so, naturally, there was very room left at the table of philosophy for the Communists.