Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, releases August 20, following up Churchianity, which hit number 1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.

The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.

The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.

Maneuver warfare, often controversial and requiring operational and tactical innovation, poses perhaps the most important doctrinal questions currently facing the conventional military forces of the U.S. Its purpose is to defeat the enemy by disrupting the opponent’s ability to react, rather than by physical destruction of forces. This book develops and explains the theory of maneuver warfare and offers specific tactical, operational, and organizational recommendations for improving ground combat forces. The authors translate concepts—too often vaguely stated by maneuver warfare advocates—into concrete doctrine. Although the book uses the Marine Corps as a model, the concepts, tactics, and doctrine discussed apply to any ground combat force.

The original definitions of the SSH profiles

ALPHA: The Alpha is the tall, good-looking guy who is the center of both male and female attention. The classic star of the football team who is dating the prettiest cheerleader. The successful business executive with the beautiful, stylish, blonde, size zero wife. All the women are attracted to him, while all the men want to be him, or at least be his friend. At a social gathering like a party, he's usually the loud, charismatic guy telling self-flattering stories to a group of top-tier women who are listening with interest. However, Alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the Alpha's gratification, physical and psychological, they are actually more concerned with their overall group status.

BRAVO: Bravos are the good-looking guys who aren't as uniformly attractive or socially dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women, and do well with them. At the party, they are the loud guy's friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the tier-one women and cheerfully pairing up with the tier-two women. Bravos tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don't have a lot of illusions about them either. Bravos tend to be happy, secure in themselves, and are up for anything their Alpha wants to do. When they marry, it is not infrequently to a woman who was one of the Alpha's former girlfriends.

DELTA: The normal guy. Deltas are the great majority of men. They can't attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league. This is ironic, because Deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a Delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing of attendance upon her. In a social setting, the Deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man rhapsodizes about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he is almost certainly a Delta. Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly a little afraid of them.

GAMMA: The introspective, the unusual, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Gammas are often intelligent, usually unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the Gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex. This mostly depends upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. Too introspective for their own good, Gammas are the men who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time and supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly romantic rhyming doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are probably in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there... sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women, the current direction of which is directly tied to their present situation. However, they are sexual rejects, not social rejects.

OMEGA: The truly unfortunate. Omegas are the social losers who were never in the game. Sometimes creepy, sometimes damaged, often clueless, and always undesirable. They're not at the party. It would never have crossed anyone's mind to invite them in the first place. Omegas are either totally indifferent to women or hate them with a borderline homicidal fury.

SIGMA: The outsider who doesn't play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow. The Sigma is hated by Alphas because Sigmas are the only men who don't accept or at least acknowledge, however grudgingly, their social dominance. Everyone else is vaguely confused by them. In a social situation, the sigma is the man who stops in briefly to say hello to a few friends accompanied by a tier-one girl that no one has ever seen before. Sigmas like women, but tend to be contemptuous of them. They are usually considered to be strange, but cool. Gammas often like to think they are Sigmas, failing to understand that Sigmas are not social rejects, they are at the top of the social hierarchy despite their refusal to play by its rules.

LAMBDA: Those men who have quite literally no interest in conventional male-female sexual relations. They clearly have their own hierarchy of sorts, but I can't say that I know much about it other than it appears to somehow involve youth, free weights, and mustaches.

Now, it is important to keep in mind that it serves absolutely no purpose to identify yourself in some manner that you think is "better" or higher up the hierarchy. No one cares what you think you are and your opinion about your place in the social hierarchy is probably the opinion that matters least. There is no good or bad here, there is only what happens to be observable in social interaction. Consider: Alphas seemingly rule the roost and yet they live in a world of constant conflict and status testing. Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one's childhood. Bravos... okay, bravos actually have it pretty good. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you can't improve your chances of success in the social game if you begin by attempting to deceive yourself as to where you stand vis-a-vis everyone else around you.

By the year 2000 there will on present projections be seven billion people swarming on the surface of the Earth. And only nine hundred million of them will be white. What will happen when the teeming billions of the so-called Third World—driven by unbearable hunger and despair, the inevitable consequences of insensate over-population—descend locust-like on the lush lands of the complacent white nations? Jean Raspail has the rare imagination and courage necessary to face this terrifying question head-on. Readers of whatever color and political persuasion will find in The Camp of the Saints (already a bestseller in France and America) a hypnotically readable novel of compelling power that will disturb, provoke and horrify them by turns. And so powerful is its impact that once you have read it you will need brain surgery to forget it.

A 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by author and explorer Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the Western world. Almost 40 years after its initial publication, the novel returned to the bestseller list in 2011.