For too long has Aquinas’s motion proof languished in the gaol of a contemporary Thomistic metaphysics unwilling to fully countenance the debt which Aquinas’s metaphysics owes to Aristotelian natural philosophy and unable to recapture the ground taken by materialist, naturalist, or positivist accounts of the cosmos. Shields’s book represents a real jail-break and counterattack.
The martyr can let himself be conquered by physical death; the doctor must hold fast to true knowledge so that he is not conquered by intellectual death. And if he does not have such knowledge, he should not become a doctor in the first place. For the theologian, not fortitude, but the truth, will set him free.
Regarding the Sed Contra episode “NFP and the Supposed Contraceptive Mentality,” a listener asks when it is permissible for a married couple to take recourse to infertile periods so as to be able to have sex while avoiding conception. Dr. Matthew Dugandzic replies
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
Daniel Shields briefly responds to the review by John Brungardt of his book, Nature and Nature’s God.