New Journal for the Study of St. Thomas

The Thomas Institute in Utrecht has announced the launch of a new open access journal for the study of St. Thomas: The European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas (EJSTA). It is a joint initiative of  the Thomas Instituut Utrecht (NL), the Faculty of Theology of Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń (PL) and the Saint Thomas Aquinas Institute for Theology and Culture of the Faculty of Theology (ISTAC) of the University of Fribourg (CH).

Included is a call for contributions (deadline: February 1, 2019)

For more information, visit their website

Aquinas the Biblical Theologian Conference

Registration is now open for the 2019 Aquinas the Biblical Theologian conference at Ave Maria University (February 7-9, 2019), co-sponsored by The Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal and The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Scott Hahn and Matthew Levering will be featured as keynote speakers. Featured Thomistic speakers include John Boyle, Randall Smith, Jörgen Vijgen, Michael Dauphinais, and Michael Waldstein. Members of The Sacra Doctrina Project will also present, including Steven Long, Taylor Patrick O’Neill, Daniel Lendman, Brandon L. Wanless, Sean Robertson, and Daniel Garland, Jr.

See the Ave Maria conferences website (below) for more information about the conference, including a tentative schedule of presentations.

Veritas & Amor Thomistic Contest

The Circolo San Tommaso is calling for submissions from individuals 35-years-old or less for their 2019 Veritas et Amor Contest, with two distict sections: Culture and Art.

No entry fees.

Deadline: February 15, 2019

> Culture Section

Open to degree or PhD theses and monographs focused on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, including (but not limited to) domains not strictly philosophical or theological (e.g. in human and social sciences: law, economics, political science, sociology, etc.) examined or first published not before 2015.

The topic is free.

The first-place winner of the Culture category shall receive a € 2,000 award and be offered an opportunity of presenting his/her thesis or monograph at Aquino.

> Art Section

Open to works in classical or contemporary art mediums (painting, plastic arts, performing arts, video art, etc.) focused on or inspired by the person, life or thought of Thomas Aquinas. For painting, the maximum size is 150 cm x 150 cm or 170 cm x 120 cm. For plastic works, the maximum size is 150 cm (height) and 1 m x 1 m (base).

The topic is free, but the suggested topic is: Thomas Aquinas, the eucharist, the incarnation.

The first-place winner of the Art category shall receive a € 2,000 award and be offered an opportunity of presenting or exhibiting his/her work at Aquino, Italy. The second-place and third-place winners of the Art category shall be offered an opportunity of presenting or exhibiting their works at Aquino, Italy.

The winners will be presented in Aquino, Italy on March 2, 2019.

Aquinas Manuscripts Now Online

The Vatican Library has digitized and publicly shared over 15,000 of its own manuscripts on its website: https://digi.vatlib.it

After a quick search for “Aquinas” this amateur researcher was able to spot manuscripts originating as early as the fifteenth century from St. Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle, the Summa contra gentiles, De potentia Dei, De malo, the Scriptum, Quodlibeta, and the Summa theologiae, to name a few. Pages and pages of results turn up. Have fun exploring!

With thanks to Aleteia.org for originally sharing the story.

Call for Papers: "Identity and Tradition. Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers"

Please see the note below regarding the details and call for papers.

“We would like to draw your attention to the International Conference entitled: “Identity and Tradition. Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers” to be held April 4-6, 2019 in Torun, Poland. Our keynote speakers include Serge-Thomas Bonino O.P. (Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome), Carmelo Conticello (CNRS-Paris), Dominic Legge O.P. (Dominican House of Studies, Washington D.C.), Enrique Alarcón (University of Navarra, Pamplona) and Paul van Geest (Tilburg University). The deadline for submitting a paper is December 1, 2018. For more information, please check the attached file or the website: www.biblicalthomism.umk.pl. Please feel free to distribute this to your colleagues and students who might be interested in joining us.”

From Jörgen Vijgen & Piotr Roszak

Thomas Instituut Jaarboeken online!

In case you didn’t know, all the Thomas Instituut Jaarboeken from 1981 to 2017 are now available online! You can download all of them as PDF files. This is really nice. For Jaarboeken 1981-2000 go here, and for Jaarboeken 2001-2017 go here.

Under New Management

Exciting news! After some discussions with Dr. Mark Johnson, the founder of Thomistica, the Aquinas Center of Ave Maria University has handed over the ownership and management of this website to the founders of the Sacra Doctrina Project, many of whom have contributed articles here in the past. Please feel free to peruse their website to learn about the founders, senior advisors, and affiliate members - in addition to their mission and initiatives. You may also follow the Project on Twitter (@sacradoctrina) and Facebook  (facebook.com/thesacradoctrinaproject).

Our esteemed contributors here at Thomistica will continue to post insightful articles and news pertaining to Thomistic scholarship, but the Sacra Doctrina Project will also endeavor to increase the frequency of posts, articles, and discussion, so stay tuned in the coming months; ite ad Thomisticam!"

Hiring in Philosophy at UST and Center for Thomistic Studies

Please notice the three job advertisements here:

https://www.higheredjobs.com/search/details.cfm?JobCode=176813948&Title=Philosophy%20-%20Faculty%20Openings

Please note that all three are for permanent positions. They are not advertised on Jobs for Philosophers.

Thomas Aquinas at Kalamazoo

54th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

9—12 May 2019

There will be a total of 6 sessions devoted to Medieval philosophical and theological thought, especially that of Aquinas, sponsored by:

The Center for Thomistic Studies, c/o S.J. Jensen, Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas (TX), 3800 Montrose, Houston, TX  77006-4696. FAX: (713) 942-3464. email:  jensensj@stthom.edu . Three sessions will be devoted to any topic about the philosophy of Aquinas, his sources, or contemporary applications of his thought. 

The Thomas Aquinas Society, c/o John F. Boyle, Department of Catholic Studies, 55-S, University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Ave, St. Paul, MN 55105.  Fax: (651) 962-5710, email: jfboyle@stthomas.edu. For these three sessions, proposals on any topic dealing with Aquinas are welcome.

Papers are 20 minutes in length. 

Paper submissions must include a 300 word abstract and a completed Participant Information Form (attached)

Deadline for submissions: 15 Sep 2018.

The Kalamazoo conference is the largest congress for Medieval Studies in the world.  Cost of room and board is quite moderate, and the atmosphere congenial to those interested in Aquinas.

New Book: Thomas Aquinas on the Beatitudes

In MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which was written in 1981, he argued that even though modern thinkers continued to possess a “simulacra of morality” they had actually “very largely, if not entirely” lost the theoretical and practical comprehension of morality. Indeed, Kantian deontologism and Enlightenment philosophy have both done their part to hinder modern man from an appreciation of the role of virtue and teleology. Thankfully, though, as virtue ethics has become more popular and as Thomists have begun to reassert the foundational role the human desire for happiness has in the moral life (by turning, time and again, to the beginning of the Secunda Pars), some of us moderns have found ourselves on the correct path. Nevertheless, despite the relative proliferation of works on the virtues since the time After Virtue was written, there has not been much work done on the beatitudes, which are, for Thomas, “acts of perfect virtue” (see II-II, q. 29 a. 4 ad 1 and q. 79 aa. 1 & 3) that are distinguished from virtues  “not as habit from habit, but as act from habit” (I-II, q. 69 a. 1). It’s good to see that Fr. Anton ten Klooster is taking steps to fill this lacuna.

Click here for more info and ordering info.

Free access to Divus Thomas (Fribourg) 1887-2016

With the digitalization of the journal Divus Thomas (Fribourg) from 1887 to 2016 by the Swiss website e-periodica the Thomistic community has yet another tool easily available for the historical and systematical study of Thomism in recent times.

One of the ways to implement Pope Leo XIII’s vision in Aeterni Patris (1879) was the founding of journals specifically devoted to the study of Thomism. Already in 1880 the Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza founded the journal Divus Thomas, which still exists today. In 1881, the recently founded Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas started the publication of its yearbook L'Accademia Romana di S. Tommaso D'Aquino. The Academy continues this tradition with the publication of Doctor Communis, containing the proceedings of their annual plenary session (the latest issue Dio creatore e la creazione come casa commune. Prospettive Tomiste inaugurates a new collaboration with the Urbaniana University Press). In Belgium, Désiré Mercier founded the Revue Néo-Scolastique in  1894 and the first issue of Revue Thomiste was published in the same year (the first decades are available online).

For the German speaking world, the Thomistic community owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Ernst Commer (1847-1928), who founded the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie in 1887. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Michael Glossner defines the goals of the journal as follows: the “Wiederhebung der Philosophie aus tiefem Verfall zu der ihr gebührenden Stellung als erste under den natürlichen Wissenschaften durch Anknüpfung an die gewaltsam unterbrochene Tradition, durch Wiedergewinnung einer sicheren Grundlage in allgemein anerkanntnen Prinzipien und ruhige kontinuierliche Weiterbilding auf Grund derselben.” (Jahrbuch 11 (1897), 2).

Gallus M. Manser OP (ob. 1950)

From the very first issue onwards, key features of the Thomistic synthesis are given their proper place, i.e. the real distinction between being and essence, the principle of individuation and in particular the doctrine of praemotio physica (e.g. Norberto del Prado’s De concordia physicae praemotionis cum libero arbitrio in the 1903 issue). Of equal importance are the many contributions in the field of biology and physics, e.g. the many articles by Joseph Gredt in the 1920’s on electrons and on Einstein’s theory of relativity.

In 1914 the journal changes its name to Divus Thomas and in 1922 the Fribourg Dominicans Gallus Häfele (1882-1960) and Gallus Manser (1866-1950) become its editors. One of the principal controversies to which the journal devotes extensive attention concerned the molinism of the Innsbruck Jesuit Johann B. Stufler, as expressed in his 1923 “Divi Thomae Aquinatis doctrina De Deo operante in omni operatione naturae creatae praesertim liberi arbitrii”. In these years the journal becomes the preferred place to publish the research of such Thomists as Joseph Gredt, Martin Grabmann, Santiago Ramirez, Gallus Manser and others. The 1953 issue contains an index for the years 1923-1953.

In 1954 the journal changes its name to its current one: Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie, officially to end the confusion that had arisen with the Italian journal of the same name. The change in name is however indicative for the declining influence of Thomism in these years, as becomes apparent from the indices of these years. Thomas Aquinas almost disappears from the journal with the exception of an issue devoted to him in 1974, containing important articles whose titles are indicative for that time (Y. Congar, Saint Thomas d'Aquin et l'esprit oecuménique; J. H. Nicholas, Liberté du théologien et autorité du Magistère).

Between 1982 and 2017 the journal published 35 articles on St. Thomas by scholars such as J.-P. Torrell (Frère Thomas d'Aquin prédicateur 29 (1982), 1/2, 175-188), John F. Wippel (The Latin Avicenna as a source of Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics 37 (1990), 1/2, 51-90), Ruedi Imbach (Notule sur le commentaire du "Liber de causis" de Siger de Brabant et ses rapports avec Thomas d'Aquin 43 (1996), 3, 304-323), Rupert Mayer (Stockwerkphilosophie gegen Stockwerktheologie : zum "desiderium naturale" bei Henri de Lubac und Thomas von Aquin 56 (2009), 1, 164-193) and Gilles Emery (Le mode personnel de l'agir trinitaire suivant Thomas d'Aquin 50 (2003), 3, 334-353).

Call for Papers Torún (Poland), April 4-6, 2019

The Faculty of Theology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torún, Poland is organizing it’s third international conference on the thought of Thomas Aquinas in April 2019. The first in 2015 was entitled “Towards a Biblical Thomism. The biblical exegesis of Thomas Aquinas and its contemporary relevance” and its proceedings were published by Brepols. The second conference in 2017 was devoted to “Towards a Biblical Thomism: Aquinas and the Renewal of Biblical Theology” and its proceedings have been published recently by Eunsa.

The third conference, which will be held April 4-6, 2019, is entitled “Identity and Tradition. Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers”.

The keynote and other main lectures will be given by Serge-Thomas Bonino O.P. (Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome), Carmelo Conticello (CNRS-Paris), Dominic Legge O.P. (Dominican House of Studies, Washington D.C.), Enrique Alarcón (University of Navarra, Pamplona) and Paul van Geest (Tilburg University).

Papers may be given preferably in English and the presentation should take 20-25 minutes. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of approximately 300 words (along with your name, academic affiliation and contact information) to piotrroszak@umk.pl by November 15, 2018. Notification of acceptance will be given by December 15, 2018. For more info see http://biblicalthomism.umk.pl/ or the full Call for Papers here.