Update from the Aquinas Institute on Publishing the Opera Omnia of Saint Thomas

The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, located in Lander, Wyoming, embarked a few years ago on a monumental project to publish the complete works of Saint Thomas in a uniform edition. The text of Aquinas is always given in parallel Latin-English columns (the Latin edition is the best one available and the English translations have been reviewed by an editorial team for accuracy). In the NT commentaries, the Scripture text is given in Greek (latest edition of Nestle-Aland), Latin (the Clementine Vulgate), and English (the Douay-Rheims because of its rendering of the Vulgate). The volumes are hardcovers with sewn bindings and gold-stamped covers and spines. We have completed the first phase of our publishing project with the following sets:

Commentaries on Matthew and John (4 vols.)

Commentaries on the Letters of Paul (5 vols.)

The Summa theologiae (8 vols.)

The masterful Scripture commentaries of the Angelic Doctor—greatly praised by Leo XIII and many other popes, acknowledged as the pinnacle of their genre, and yet bizarrely hard to come by until now, if available at all—are the first projects we took on, in recognition of the primacy of the Word of God in sacred theology. Future plans include all of Thomas’s Old Testament commentaries as well. 

Having published Matthew, John, Paul, and the Summa, we are now turning our attention to the rest of the Opera Omnia—and here is where we can definitely use your help! We keep the cost of our volumes low to make them widely available, but as a result, the only way we can manage the initial print run of volumes is to obtain funding through donations. Donors receive a complimentary copy of the volumes they help to fund.

Go to our website to use your donation as a vote for what will be printed next—and to be among the first to receive a copy of that set. Once a volume has been funded, this offer of a complimentary copy will cease for that volume, and we will then sell it via Amazon. (For multi-volume sets like the Sentences commentary, donors will receive each volume as it is printed. We are starting with Book IV, which contains Thomas's lengthiest treatment of the sacraments and the liturgy. Work on Book IV is, in fact, well under way.)

We have editors and translators lined up for most of the works of Aquinas, but we will focus our efforts on the works that are most funded by you, our readers.  Please spread the word by sharing this article with any of your colleagues or friends who might be interested.

Ite ad Thomam!

The Aquinas Institute

www.theaquinasinstitute.org

Interview about Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas conference in Houston

Zenit has published an interview I conducted with John Hittinger (The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Houston and the John Paul II Forum) about the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas conference this Oct. 17-19 in Houston. You can find the interview here. John is one of the conference organizers. Tom Osborne, who teaches at The Center for Thomistic Studies and is a Thomistica.net contributor, posted about the conference earlier this year.

New volume in the Leonine Edition

The long awaited volume in the Leonine Edition, containing the sermons of St. Thomas and prepared by the late Fr. Louis-Jacques Bataillon OP, will be presented during a two-day conference at Le Saulchoir in Paris on 5-6 december 2013. The website of the Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques has the program.

The publisher of the Leonine Edition, Cerf, now has a 50% discount on the previous printed volumes of the Leonine Edition.

Call for papers: Scotus's logic and natural theology in medieval Judaism

Here is the notice from PhilPapers:

The Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics is inviting submissions for two volumes (volume 12:1 and volume 12:2), planned for Spring 2015 in our series with Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Gyula Klima and Alex Hall eds.) The deadline for submissions for either volume is December 31, 2013.

Volume 12:1 – The Logic of John Duns Scotus

Volume 12:2 – Natural Theology in Medieval Judaism

Submissions should be sent to Alexander Hall at alexanderhall@clayton.edu.

ACPA Meeting “Aristotle Now and Then” (November 1-3, 2013)

The conference schedule is now online for the 2013 annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. The conference, hosted by Marian University and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), will meet in Indianapolis and the theme this year is “Aristotle Now and Then”. Registration information is here. The conference has expanded its offerings, and there many satellite sessions on a variety of topics.

Call for papers: Aquinas's moral philosophy

It is a little late to be posting this notice but I just came across it and, as they say, better late than never. The online journal Diametros, which is sponsored by the Institute of Philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, has announced a call for papers on Aquinas’s moral philosophy and contemporary practical ethics. The deadline is Tuesday, September 10! Here is the notice from PhilPapers:

The Editorial Board of Diametros - An Online Journal of Philosophy is planning to publish a special edition of the journal dedicated to actual and possible applications of Thomas Aquinas’ moral theory to the problems of contemporary practical ethics. The thematic scope of the publication is considerably broad, and that in two respects. On the one hand, we believe that there are a number of issues in St. Thomas’ moral philosophy, in particular his doctrine of natural law, which need to be considered in relation to contemporary practical ethics. On the other hand, Aquinas’ moral theory will certainly shed new light on many issues in practical ethics, especially in bioethics. Thus we do not wish to limit the scope of the articles published in the special edition. However, we would appreciate that the articles not be focused too narrowly on specific issues, so that the special edition will be of interest to a broader audience and not only to specialists in St. Thomas’ ethics.

NCBQ Issue Devoted to the Critique of the New Natural Law Theory Available for Download

As earlier noted, the Spring 2013 issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly is a special issue devoted to criticism of the New Natural Law Theory (NNLT) for which I was given the honor of being named guest editor. Notwithstanding the clear desire of the NNLT authors—e.g., Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Robert George, and other prominent proponents—to serve the Church, the special issue of the NCBQ outlines areas of grave concern regarding the NNLT in itself, its practical implications, and in its opposition to the traditional Thomistic understanding central to the moral magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. This issue is now available for free download. The table of contents; my brief introduction to the entire issue; essays by Fulvio di Blasi, Matthew B. O’Brien, Michael Pakaluk, and Edward Feser; articles by Rev. Kevin L. Flannery, SJ, myself, and John Goyette—indeed the entire contents of the issue—are now available for free download from the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly here.

New De Veritate Translation and Commentary

Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, has published a new German translation of St. Thomas’s De Veritate with commentary. Details in English are available at the DSPT website (here).

Thomism Conference by Dominican Friars

A conference of the Friars of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) on Thomistic thought today (“Dominicans & the Renewal of Thomism”) was held July 1-5, 2013, at the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. The conference, centered around the theme: “The Doctrine of God, One & Triune,” was well attended, with over 100 friars present from around the world. A list of the main presentations is available online; videos of them are being posted as they become edited.

This gathering is the second of what is hoped will be a triennial event, the next of which has been proposed for Toulouse, France, in 2016. The first such meeting was held in Warsaw, Poland, in 2010 (papers from which have been published as Dominicans and the Challenge of Thomism). Texts from this summer’s conference are to be published as a volume of Nova et Vetera.

Summa fratris Alexandri now available from Critical Reprints

Critical Reprints has just published a reprint of Alexander of Hales’s Summa theologiae. You can get it at 20% from now till the end of July. The coupon code is JULYBOOKS13.