These commentaries are a rich addition to the continued study of St. Thomas Aquinas and his thought, especially as it relates to Sacred Scripture. This is certainly a worthwhile addition to any library and the necessary completion to the set. Once again, Jason Paone and Word on Fire Academic has produced an eminently usable and needed volume of the Scriptural work of the Angelic Doctor.
Read MoreIt makes for a difficult task to review a book that contains no material ambiguities, let alone any asserted errors whatsoever; that is, I agree with everything I read. Hannon clearly has contemplated carefully, deeply, and regularly how Aquinas considers the intricate words and actions of the Mass; undoubtedly, he has done the same for the liturgy itself.
Read More[Davison's] inquiry proceeds at two mutually reinforcing levels: a natural theology of creation that informs arguments about the fittingness and possibility of rational life beyond the human domain as well as a strictly theological speculation about the implications of such a possibility for our understanding of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the person of Christ, and eschatology.
Read MoreWhere Stevenson’s work excels is its sustained critique of the historical Jesus scholarship, showing how metaphysical commitments cannot be sidestepped, since they remain deeply implicated in questions of historical method.
Read MoreJean Rioux has written an admirable synthesis of the main debates in the philosophy of mathematics between those of a largely classical perspective, particularly as in Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, and the whole modern mathematical project begun especially by Cantor.
Read MoreKevin Vallier, in his book All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, presents the first book-length critique of the contemporary revival of Catholic integralism. Vallier’s work seeks to show the insufficiency of Catholic integralism as well as other religiously motivated anti-liberal theories. Vallier ultimately rejects Catholic integralism because, as he argues, it cannot transition from a liberal order to an integralist one, it is intrinsically unstable, and integralism is fundamentally unjust. Liberals, post-liberals, and integralists will find much to take from this book. Vallier’s arguments set an agenda for integralists to expand and deepen their own philosophical and theological politics.
Read MoreAmong the many contributors to the revival of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature in recent decades one must include the work of William Wallace, O.P., Benedict Ashley, O.P., Nancy Cartwright, Robert Koons, William Simpson, Edward Feser, and many others. We can now include Fr. Andrew Younan’s title, Matter and Mathematics. Younan’s work is a refreshing, briskly argued addition to recent debates about the nature of the laws of nature that avoids pointless detours into their details without eschewing their necessary substance.
Read MoreIt was many years ago when I first learned about the android of St. Albert the Great. It is recorded, among other loca, in the oh-so-reliable Supplement to Mr. Chambers's Cyclopædia: or, Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in 1753 …
Read MoreSullivan’s book is one with which further scholarly and even pastoral engagement is needed. Such were the contexts in which I studied the book, while leading a monthly seminar on Habits and Holiness during the 2021–22 academic year. The participants were diocesan priests in Wichita, and, apart from the fraternity of the group itself, the further purpose of the discussion was to become better ministers of the sacrament of confession towards the end of bearing greater spiritual fruit in the lives of penitents. After reviewing the scope and contents of the work, along with a closer look at some points of detail, I close with some feedback from the monthly seminar.
Read MoreFor the first time, St. Thomas’s exposition of The Divine Names is available commercially in English. This exquisite 549 page volume includes an introduction, endnotes, a table of citations of The Divine Names in other works of Aquinas, and indexes pertaining to Scripture, Persons, and Terms used. …
Read MoreFew topics inspire more controversy today than human sexuality and gender identity. There is no shortage of Thomistic reflections on the nature of sexual difference in human persons. Typically, Thomists must navigate between the manifest image of human sexual difference and Aquinas’s assumption of medieval Aristotelian biology (e.g., Nolan or Johnston), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the post-scientific image of gender adopted in indefinitely diverse ways by our contemporaries. An array of ethical and moral theological literature on marriage, the conjugal act, and the family is ready to hand. …
Read MoreHan-Luen Kantzer Komline loves the Doctor of Grace not only as her theological guide but also as her personal companion, and that makes Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account a joy to read. Indeed, Kantzer Komline writes as though she traveled alongside St. Augustine from his conversion in Milan to his death in Hippo. Her prose is sophisticated with a familial lilt, a soulfulness that is rare in academic writing. Better still, she allows Augustine to speak for himself before she paraphrases or synthesizes; he was schooled as a rhetorician, after all. Rather than feigning originality, she allows Augustine to be Augustine without projecting any twenty-first century vogue onto him. Thus, Kantzer Komline presents a true theology, reaching the heart of what affiliates of the Sacra Doctrina Project cherish as “both scientia and sapientia.”
Read MoreTeaching the subjects of logic and natural theology well is no easy task, and aids are greatly to be desired, particularly by beginning teachers. Prof. Houser and Fr. Dodds have recently and respectively published excellent means to each end. My reason for discussing these two books together is to venture, at the end of this review essay, a few ideas concerning philosophical pedagogy in today’s classroom. This review of both books is based upon my own classroom use.
Read MoreReinhard Hütter has written perhaps the most significant theological work of 2020. John Henry Newman On Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times is a trenchant critique of contemporary culture providing insights gained by Hütter’s ease in making Sts. Thomas Aquinas and Newman conversation partners. Hütter astounds the reader not only has with his command of Newman’s writings but also by showing how each of Newman’s works fit into his life. For my part, I have found the book to be an important course-preparation resource for establishing a development of doctrine framework in the Church history classes I have taught in seminary over the past academic year. I am re-reading and discussing the text with one of our seminarians.
Read MoreStephen L. Brock’s The Light That Binds is an excellent treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas’s natural law teaching in the Summa theologiae. The exposition and argument present a cogent and insightful tour of the theological and metaphysical architecture of the legal transept, as it were, of the cathedral that is Aquinas’s Summa, all while engaging the views of a variety of contemporary scholars. In what follows, I consider the book overall, note some high points of its chapters, and offer some thoughts for future readers of the book.
Read MoreIn his monograph, Cosmology Without God? The Problematic Theology Inherent in Modern Cosmology—a revised version of his doctoral dissertation written under Michael Hanby at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America—Fr. David Alcalde pronounces a harsh sentence on the cogency of much contemporary science-religion dialogue, in particular in the domain of theological claims made in virtue of the hypotheses, theories, or conclusions of modern cosmology
Read MoreEdward Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019) is consequently a welcome addition to the late 20th- and early 21st-century resurgence of broadly Aristotelian and Thomistic approaches to the philosophy of nature, and the volume spells out in detail and begins to develop the metaphysical grounds to which Simon refers. It is essential reading for those interested in the topic of the perennial Aristotelian philosophy of nature and its relationship to the particular natural sciences.
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Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers, edited by Michael Dauphinais, Andrew Hofer, O.P., and Roger Nutt, Sapientia Press: Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida, 2019.
In this latest of volumes that are the product of joint conferences between the Thomistic Institute of the Dominican House of Studies (Washington, DC) and the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal of Ave Maria University (Ave Maria, FL), the editors and authors address what is variously identified as a “tragic dialectic,” a “false dichotomy,” and a “hermeneutical binary” that has arisen between the theology of Thomas Aquinas and that of the Greek Fathers. As this volume makes clear, whatever one might call this outdated approach, it fails to appreciate the mass of textual evidence supporting the considerable influence which the Greek Fathers exercised upon St. Thomas’ mature works, especially the Tertia Pars and the biblical commentaries. This volume also demonstrates that the dichotomous view profoundly incapacitates the contemporary theologian from attending with any sensitivity to the profound modes of complementarity that exist between the joint “cruciform proclamations of the truth of the Gospel” in Aquinas and the Greek Fathers.
For students of St. Thomas this volume will be a welcome addition to their library and is likely to assist in future studies of patristic themes in Aquinas. In particular, citing only a few of the many excellent essays contained herein, students ought to attend closely to the works of Fr. Khaled Anatolios (University of Notre Dame), “The Ontological Grammar of Salvation and the Salvific Work of Christ in Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas,” and Joseph Wawrykow, “The Greek Fathers in the Eucharistic Theology of Thomas Aquinas.” Both of these essays, which can be profitably read together, are masterful presentations of the complementarity that becomes possible when one abandons the false binary between Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Likewise, the contribution of Jorgen Vijgen (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland), “Aquinas’s Reception of Origen: A Preliminary Study,” the longest in the volume, is noteworthy for its extensive treatment of explicit references to Origen in Aquinas’ works and certainly invites further research. All of the essays, and the volume as a whole, reinforce for students and scholars the generous spirit, a spirit requisite for the renewal of theology today (see Fr. Andrew Hofer’s conclusion), with which St. Thomas went about his study and teaching of theology.
Reviewed by Gideon Barr
John M. Meinert offers a signal contribution to contemporary scholarship on the gifts of the Holy Spirit in The Love of God Poured Out: Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas composed his Summa theologiae as a unified presentation of sacra doctrina, and Meinert uncovers the riches of reading the treatise on grace in the Summa alongside the treatise on the gifts.
Servais Pinckaers argued that that the gifts of the Holy Spirit exert a perpetual and pervasive influence on the Christian moral life, contrary to the more traditional reading of Aquinas that the gifts are only intermittently activated by a distinct grade of supernatural inspirations. Meinert gives greater traction to Pinckaers’s interpretation by arguing in various ways that the instinctus of the Holy Spirit is in fact identical with the common auxilium that God gives to believers, i.e. actual grace. From this central thesis, Meinert offers an impressive number of implications for Thomistic thought on the modes of human action, sacramental grace, merit, perseverance, the divisions of grace, the relations between grace, gifts, and virtues, etc. The book also contains some handy expositions of St. Thomas’s analogous uses of the terms instinctus, auxilium, necessity, and motion. Meinert offers a highly credible alternative to the traditional reading of St. Thomas on the gifts. His project, however, would be helpfully supplemented with a more thorough account of the context in which St. Thomas developed his theology of the gifts as well as the formation of the traditional consensus about their unique mode of operation. I suspect that investigating these contexts will give conclusive evidence that Meinert has in fact struck key insights in St. Thomas’s thought.
The Love of God Poured Out is highly technical and would not be suitable for anyone who is not already familiar with St. Thomas’s treatments of both grace and the gifts. That said, for anyone with a serious scholarly interest in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, this book is simply indispensable.
- Reviewed by Joshua Revelle, The Catholic University of America
Christopher J. Thompson’s first publication formally introducing his “Green Thomism” is a work of art. For years, Thompson has been quietly coordinating this Thomistic vision for ecology through his Chapelstone Foundation and with a number of articles calling for theologians and other thinkers to give serious moral consideration to the intersection of the Catholic worldview and the growing need for ecological stewardship. Now, he weaves together an integral account that convincingly presents our contemporary deficit with regard to the natural order of lower creation and also argues for a proper vision rooted in the Thomistic philosophical and theological tradition. Throughout, Thompson relies upon the doctrine of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, beautifully demonstrating the Thomistic precedent in the holy father’s encyclical.
The Joyful Mystery: Field Notes toward a Green Thomism is available from Emmaus Road Publishing in their Living Faith Series as a small, easy-to-read and easy-to-enjoy hardback. It is accessible at a popular level to readers who have some familiarity with the Catholic Thomistic tradition. Just because it is accessible, however, does not mean that it is not intellectually worthwhile. Its import primarily lies, however, in its ability to personally challenge the reader to convert their minds and hearts and habits to Jesus Christ, the Logos Incarnate, the same sapiential Logos who both creates and redeems in a joyful mystery, summoning a proper response of awe and adoration from us rational animals.
- Reviewed by Brandon L. Wanless
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
