Contributions
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Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing
Arielle Harms reviews Melissa Moschella on the New Natural Law.
Return to the Heart: The Biblical Spirituality of St. Augustine's Confessions
Matthew Vander Vennet reviews Shane Owens’s work leading deeper into the heart of the Confessions.
Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts
Aaron James Weisel reviews Daniel McInerny’s case against a dichotomy between philosophy and the arts.
Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas's Commentaries on the Mass
It 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.
Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine
[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.
The Consciousness of the Historical Jesus
Where 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.
The Mathematical Realism of Thomas Aquinas
Jean 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.
All the Kingdoms of the World
Kevin 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.
Matter, Mathematics, and the Laws of Nature
Among 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.
The Life and Times of the Universal Doctor
It 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 …
The More than Seven Habits of Highly Holy People
Sullivan’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.
Aquinas on The Divine Names (Latin-English version)
For 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. …
Recovering the Discarded Image of Man and Woman
Few 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. …
Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account
Han-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.”
The Return of the Manuals?
Teaching 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.
Newman on Truth and its counterfeits
Reinhard 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.
That Binding Yet Kindly Light
Stephen 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.
The Heavens Declare the Glory of God
In 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
What Is the Philosophy of Nature? Review of Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge
Edward 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.
