Follow-up on the death of Père Bataillon

I’ve found some other online references to the death of Fr Louis-Jacques Bataillon, OP, about which I posted on February 14, 2009. In fact, there is a short video of Fr Bataillon presenting regarding biblical exemplum.

Other sites have notices, commentary, and bibliography:

• International Medieval Sermon Studies Society (link)
• Sermones.net: éditions électroniques de sermons latins médiévaux (link)
• Pecia : Le manuscrit médiéval ~ The medieval manuscript (link)

A gratefully-received donation

A big shout-out to Robert Barry and the Theology Department at Providence College (RI), who must have read my plaintive post from last fall, and remembered it. Because of him—and a generous, anonymous student—almost four-months of hosting costs here on Thomistica.net were taken care of! Bob wrote:

A student in our graduate program made an anonymous donation to some faculty for us to forward to a cause we find worthwhile. I believe this site qualifies.

Sincere thanks to him and to the anonymous student. During these tight fiscal times every little bit helps.

“The Ethics of Organ Transplantation” at University of St. Thomas (Houston)

The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, will be sponsoring a medical ethics conference addressing the topic of organ transplantation, on March 27-29, 2009. Here’s a scrape from the conference’s PDF file.

The Ethics of Organ Transplantation, an interdisciplinary conference on medical and philosophical issues surrounding organ transplantation, will bring together experts from a variety of fields, such as philosophy, theology, and medicine. The conference seeks a coherent vision that promotes healing united with a respect for the dignity of each individual.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
D. Alan Shewmon, M.D., Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
Brain Death

Janet E. Smith, Ph.D., Fr. Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Issues, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, MI
Embryo Adoption as a Form of Organ Donation

A.A. Howsepian, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry, Veterans Administration Central California Health Care System, Fresno, CA
Organ Transplantation and Anencephalic Infants

Christopher Kaczor, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
Organ Donations after Cardiac Death

You may also wish to visit the conference’s website: http://www.stthom.edu/organ_conference.

Louis-Jacques Bataillon, OP: RIP (February 13, 2009)

Just in from Adriano Oliva, OP, of the Leonine Commission in Paris. Father Louis-Jacques Bataillon, OP, died last evening, Friday, February 13, 2009, at 6:45 p.m. He was 94 years old. This is a terrible loss for the whole community of medievalists, especially those interested in medieval sermons, for whom Fr Batallion was doyen. But it is especially hard for lovers of the life and works of St. Thomas, as Fr Louis worked assiduously on the Leonine Commission for a half-century.

At the time of his death the Leonine Commission had been working away hard to finish up volume 44 of the Opera Omnia Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, which contains Thomas’s sermons (edited by Fr Bataillon); when I last met with Fr Oliva last October (at Notre Dame and then here in Milwaukee) he told me that the Commission was at that time reviewing the proofs for volume 44 for the fifth time, with the expectation that volume 44 would see the light of day this year, in 2009. There would be some consolation in knowing that volume 44 is published in the same year as Fr Bataillon’s death.

On a personal note, Fr Bataillon was only ever kind and receptive of my inquiries. Last March, when I spent a week in Paris at the Couvent St. Jacques to work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr Bataillon was able to give me an hour—no small chore—to discuss some manuscript questions I had. His giant spirit and knowledge overcame his laboring body, and his eyes twinkled as he sat in a recliner-chair, viewing my binder of manuscript images: “Now this manuscript was probably written in Le Marche, before mid-century (i.e., before the 1250’s).” Wow.

Having worked so hard for so many years Fr Bataillon’s death at 94 cannot have been a surprise, and he has earned his reward. Still, this one really hurts.

The people over at the Dominican History website already have a short article up about Fr Bataillon’s passing. More will follow.

Update

on 2009-02-14 13:22 by Mark Johnson

Already a follow-up. I wrote the above after having gotten a Skype message from Fr Oliva, but before checking my e-mail. Fr Oliva had already sent out the following e-mail:

Hier, 13 février, à 18h45, le P. Bataillon s’est endormi dans la paix.

Hospitalisé le 12 après-midi aux urgences de la Salpêtrière, il avait été transporté hier dans une clinique chirurgicale à Saint-Cloud, où peu de temps après son arrivée, il est décédé paisiblement.

La messe des funérailles sera concélébrée à l’église du Couvent Saint-Jacques, 20 rue des Tanneries, Paris XIIIe, mardi 17 février à 14h30.

Il sera inhumé au cimetière du Montparnasse.

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas at Toulouse

I spotted this video clip on YouTube this morning. Add one more item to my life’s “to-do” list: spend Thomas’s feast day (January 28) at l’église des Jacobins in Toulouse!

Brian Mullady’s website

Brian Mullady, OP, who authored the important book in the 1980's, The Meaning of the Term "Moral" in St. Thomas Aquinas (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 1986) (permalink) has been busy on the pastoral side of things, and now has a website the lists his activities. It sports some YouTube videos dealing with nature and grace, as well as a link to a catalogue of his CD's and writings.

¡Lawrence Dewan…in Spanish!

A while back Fr Lawrence Dewan shared with me the new that there is a "Dewan Project" at Sergio Arboleda University in Bogota, Columbia. Under the supervision of Liliana Beatriz Irizar, who just published the book, Tras las Huellas del Sentido: Sabiduria y Felicidad en Lawrence Dewan (Bogota, 2008), the Dewan Project website has numerous resources about the work of Dewan, in Spanish, but also in English (here, with PDFs from Stephen Brock and Peter Kwasniewski).

Update on 2009-01-26 23:01 by Mark Johnson

Liliana Irizar provides an update and further explanation:

“We have already translated into Spanish his Marquette Lecture, thefive lectures of the Seminar on Metaphysical Foundations of Ethics (it was the Seminar’s content which Fr. Dewan gave us during his Bogotá stay last September) and his lecture on Human Rights and Human Dignity (it was Fr. Dewan’s lecture also gave here inour University). Moreover, I am preparing an article entitled “Form and Being in Saint Thomas. A study of Lawrence Dewan’s metaphysical approach.” In addition to this, we plan to publish two books in the near future: Metaphysics for Beginners and The Ontological Foundations of the Spiritual Life. Both books will contain different Fr. Dewan´s writings translated into Spanish. Thus, we need to get quite a lot of people for this task.”

Albert the Great news: Alberti magni e-corpus

Students of Albert the Great now have an on-line resource this is analogous to the enviable Corpusthomisticum.org of Enrique Alarcon; Bruno Tremblay in Canada has sponsored an on-line presence for the writings of St. Albert the Great, using PDF files of the Bourgnet edition from the 1800's. The site is called "Alberti Magni e-corpus" (link). All the texts are PD (public domain) at this point, and can be downloaded. And while these texts do not have the critical standing of the Cologne critical edition, they are nonetheless a solid starting place for researching the saint's teaching. Here's some scraping from ALBERTI MAGNI E-CORPUS site:

Albert the Great (ca. 1200 – 1280) is one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians, yet his thought remains as a whole relatively understudied. This can be explained by a variety of philosophical and historical reasons, but purely « material » factors are also at play. There is indeed no truly complete edition of his works, and the age and the rarity of the most complete one (Opera omnia, ed. A. Borgnet, 1890-1899) render it hard to access for many scholars. The new critical edition (sometimes called Editio Coloniensis), begun in 1951 and very competently led by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut of Bonn, offers a much more reliable text but will not be completed before many more decades and its high cost means that not all university libraries — including in North America and in Western Europe — can afford a subscription to it. In addition, the impressive number of Albert's works, as well as the huge size of many of them, lead one quickly to dream of the day when the critical edition will be completed and made available electronically. (One can also dream, perhaps unrealistically, that the equivalent of the Corpus Thomisticum will one day exist for Albert the Great, thus enabling anyone with access to the internet to consult the best available editions of his works for free.)

While waiting for this providential day to come, scholars can use the present website in order to :

1) download image files (.pdf) of all of Albert's works which can be found in the Borgnet edition, as well as a few other writings which have been edited individually and which, like the Borgnet edition, are too old to be covered by copyright law;
2) browse more than twenty of those works on line;
3) consult those same works, this time using a search engine endowed with boolean operators.

This site will be updated at irregular intervals, both to fix the inevitable problems occurring in this first version and to add new texts to those that can be electronically searched. A first update is planned for Spring 2009

If you choose to download some of the PDF's, note that some of them are mondo-big; the PDF for Albert's In I Sententiarum is 146 Mb in size.

Thanks, Bruno, for such a wonderful resource!

The Journée saint Thomas d’Aquin you might have seen

I meant to post this, but life got busy.

If you had been in Paris on Saturday, December 6, 2008, at the Saulchoir, you might have gone to the annual "Journée saint Thomas d'Aquin," sponsored by La societe thomist and the Le centre d'etudes du Saulchoir. Here were the papers and presentations:

• John Marenbon (Trinity College, Cambridge): L'epicurisme et le problème du paganisme au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance
• Jean-Baptiste Brenet (Université de Paris X - Nanterre) : Thomas d'Aquin pense-t-il ? (Retours sur Hic homo intelligit)
• Iacopo Costa (Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen): Vertus générales et directives. Quelques problèmes de psychologie morale thomiste
• L. J. Bataillon, G. Berceville, R. Imbach, P. Krupa, A. Oliva : Présentation de quelques ouvrages de philosophie et de théologie médiévales

Mea culpa. I'll do better next time getting this upon the site in timely fashion.

Reading Romans with St. Thomas Aquinas: Conference line-up

Wow. If you are lucky enough to be attending Ave Maria University's upcoming conference, "Reading Romans with St. Thomas Aquinas (February 5-7, 2009)," you are in for a theological (and philosophical) feast. The conference:

…[i]n accord with the current interest in theological exegesis and the history of exegesis…investigates Aquinas's Lectures on Romans in hopes of understanding what Aquinas can teach contemporary Christians about the realities that Paul, and the Holy Spirit, sought to convey.

Here is the speaker and paper line-up for the conference:

• Robert Louis Wilken (University of Virginia): "Origen, Augustine and Thomas: Interpreters of Paul's Letters to the Romans"
• Charles Raith II (Ave Maria University):"Portraits of Paul: Aquinas and Calvin on Romans 7:14-25"
• Hans Boersma (Regent College): "Ressourcement of Mystery: The Ecclesiology of Thomas Aquinas and the Letter to the Romans"
• Matthew Levering (Ave Maria University): "Aquinas on Romans 8: Predestination in Context"
• Holly Taylor Coolman (Boston College): "Romans 9-11: Re-reading Aquinas on the Jews"
• Bruce Marshall (Southern Methodist University): "Beatus vir: The Role of 'Reckoning' in Justification"
• Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford University): "Aquinas on Abraham in Romans 4"
• Patrick Henry Reardon (All Saints Antiochan Orthodox Church): "Romans 11: Hermeneutics and Salvation History"
• Geoffrey Wainwright (Duke University Divinity School:) "Rendering God's Glory: St. Paul and St. Thomas on Worship"
• Michael Sherwin, O.P. (University of Fribourg): "The love poured into our hearts: Aquinas's Interpretation of the Pauline conception of love."
• Edgardo Colón-Emeric (Duke University Divinity School): "Aquinas' Theology of Preaching in the Commentary on Romans: A Lascasian Application"
• Leo Elders, S.V.D. (Rolduc Seminary): "St. Paul on Man's Natural Knowledge of God: Romans 1:18-32 according to the commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas"
• Scott Hahn (Franciscan University of Steubenville): "Sacrifice and the Spirit of Sonship"
• Bernhard Blankenhorn O.P. (University of Fribourg): "St. Paul's Flesh/Spirit Anthropology"
• Mary Healy (Sacred Heart Major Seminary): "Aquinas' use of the Old Testament in the Commentary on Romans"
• Emmanuel Perrier O.P. (Dominican Studium): "The Filial Economy of Grace"
• John Boyle (University of St. Thomas): "The Consideration of Grace in St. Thomas' Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans"
• Michael Root (Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary): "The Christian in Binocular Vision: Aquinas and Melanchthon on Romans."
• Paul Keller O.P. (Franciscan University of Steubenville): "St. Thomas on Sacraments in Romans"
• Adam Cooper (John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family): "Degrading the Body, Suppressing the Truth: Aquinas on Romans 1:18-25"
• David S. Yeago (Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary): "Fides Formata and Pauline Theology in St. Thomas"
• Gregory Vall (Ave Maria University): "Sonship and Glory in Romans"
• Michael Waldstein (Max Seckler Professor of Theology, Ave Maria University): "The Trinitarian, Spousal and Ecclesial Logic of Justification"

James Keating (Providence College), Jeremy Holmes (Wyoming Catholic College), Thomas Joseph White O.P. (Dominican House of Studies), Jörgen Vijgen (Rolduc Seminary), Daria Lucas (University of Notre Dame), Paul Gondreau (Providence College), Mark Johnson (Marquette University), and Robert Barry (Providence College), will serve as moderators of the sessions.

An Albert the Great Bibliography

From Jörgen Vijgen (whose wonderful website see here), a downloadable PDF file containing his personal select-bibliography on Saint Albert the Great. Jörgen says, "I attach a file (the need for an Albertus Magnus bibliography for myself got a bit out of hand); maybe Thomistica-readers can profit from it." Keep letting things get out of hand, J!

Oh, the PDF file is here.

An Aquinas Institute…in the summer…in Wyoming

This in from Jeremy Holmes of Wyoming Catholic College, regarding a new summer Aquinas Institute entitled "Reading St. Paul with St. Thomas":

I thought I should update you on a project undertaken by Peter Kwasniewski, John Mortensen, and myself.  We have founded a non-profit corporation here in Lander called The Aquinas Institute whose main purpose is to offer graduate level summer courses centered on the writings of Aquinas.  We ran classes last summer with great success, so we've made it official and plan to continue.

Our regular curriculum will include three summers of work on the Summa, working through as much of the Summa as possible and treating it as a real theological source rather than as a historical artifact.  We will also offer a one-summer program in Scripture, based as much as possible around Thomas's commentaries; this coming summer, in fact, we are not doing anything with the Summa, instead reading all of Paul's letters with all of Aquinas's commentaries thereupon--probably the first time such a thing has been done since anyone can remember!

The Institute has a fine website that contains all the detailed one could want.