Italian is easy...IF you know Latin and use these charts

So runs the title of a wonderful handout that Raymond V. Schoder, S.J., distributed in 1960, as part of the “American Classical League.” I received a copy of this handout from Michael A. Fahey, S.J., some years back, and re-found it this morning here in my office at Marquette University while I was ferreting through file folders.

Since our Xerox machines these days also double a massive scanners-to-PDF creators, I scanned the thing to PDF files, combined them into one PDF in Adobe Acrobat, cleaned up, rotated and deskewed the file, and saved it here on Thomistica.net.

This handout is a perfect tool for those who need to consult Italian texts in journals, etc., but don’t have the time to take a full course. Download the 8Mb file here.

A blessed Holy Week to all.

ACPQ Rising Scholar Essay Contest

The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, the journal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, is pleased to announce its first annual Rising Scholar Essay Contest: “Any scholar who will not have attained the rank of associate professor by August 1, 2013, is invited to submit a paper that contributes to the development or elucidation of the Catholic philosophical tradition.”  For details, see:

http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/acpq/essaycontest.html

Census of North American Doctoral Dissertations on Medieval Philosophy

The website In Medias PHIL, Robert Pasnau’s medieval philosophy blog, has a recent post that lists philosophy doctoral dissertations on medieval topics currently in progress at North American universities. Nearly half of them (32 out of 68 listed dissertations) contain Aquinas’s name in their respective titles. Other medieval philosophers whose names appear more than once include: Avicenna (4), Ockham (3), Anselm (2), Augustine (2), and Albert the Great (2). Pasnau promises a future survey of European dissertations in progress. 

Happy Feast of St. Thomas

Today, March 7, is the traditional date of the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is the date of his death in 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova in Italy, where he was taken after becoming ill en route to the second Council of Lyons. The feast is still observed on March 7 in the so-called Extraordinary Form of the Roman rite, i.e., the Mass according to the 1962 Missal.

January 28, the date of the transfer of Aquinas’s relics to the Dominican church in Toulouse in 1369, is the day on which his feast is observed in the so-called Ordinary Form of the Roman rite, i.e., the Mass according to the 1969 Missal.

Aquinas Lecture at DSPT Berkeley

The 23rd Annual Aquinas Lecture at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, CA, will be delivered by Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP, DSPT Professor of History, on Wednesday, February 27, at 7:30 pm PST (10:30 pm EST). Entitled “Baptismal Theology and Practice in the Age of St. Thomas Aquinas,” the lecture will examine new discoveries about the liturgical and social significance of baptism in the cities of thirteenth-century Italy and will compare these developments to the development of the theology of baptism from the twelfth century to Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth. The lecture will be live-streamed.