Thomas E. Woods, Jr. holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. A senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he is the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers Meltdown, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Woods won the $50,000 first prize in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for his book The Church and the Market. He lives with his wife and four daughters in Topeka, Kansas.

In the new paperback edition of bestselling author's Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization", Woods describes how and why the Catholic church gave Western Civilization some of its most integral and distinctive characteristics. It comes now with new introduction by Spanish Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church Antonio Canizares. Ask someone today where Western Civilization originated, and he or she might say Greece or Rome. But what is the ultimate source of Western Civilization? Bestselling author and professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. provides the long neglected answer: the Catholic Church. In the new paperback edition of his critically-acclaimed book, "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization", Woods goes far beyond the familiar tale of monks copying manuscripts and preserving the wisdom of classical antiquity. Gifts such as modern science, free-market economics, art, music, and the idea of human rights come from the Catholic Church, explains Woods. No institution has done more to shape Western civilization than the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church - and in ways that many of us have forgotten or never known. "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" is essential reading for recovering this lost truth.