Prof. Carl Vennerstrom explores personal and social forms of acedia, tracing its origins from ancient monasticism to contemporary life and illuminating how distraction, restlessness, and identity crisis threaten fulfillment and virtue in the digital age.
Prof. Jennifer Frey’s lecture compares Aquinas and Newman on the pursuit of wisdom and happiness, showing how a true liberal education cultivates philosophical habits and interior freedom by uniting the quest for knowledge, meaning, and the common good.
Dr. Michael Krom uses Catholic social teaching and Thomistic ethics to explain the difference between minimum wage and just wage, emphasizing that justice, moral duty, and human need—not just legal or economic policy—should guide compensation for workers.
Dr. Edmund Lazzari uses Thomistic philosophy and sacramental theology to analyze whether extraterrestrial intelligences could be baptized, exploring questions of nature, the soul, salvation, and God’s freedom to grant grace beyond the human species.
Dr. Edmund Lazzari critically assesses claims that artificial intelligence systems might possess souls, arguing from Thomistic philosophy and computational neuroscience that AI lacks genuine abstraction, intentionality, and the ontological requirements for immaterial intelligence.
Dr. William Hurlbut explores the profound questions raised by neuroscience, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, emphasizing that the human soul—understood as the organizing principle of embodied, personal, and purposeful life—remains irreducibly distinct from animal, mechanical, and computa…
Fr. Ambrose Little explains why medieval philosophers studied astrology as part of natural science, showing how its connection to astronomy, cosmology, and causal mechanisms shaped intellectual inquiry, yet warns that modern astrology lacks scientific legitimacy and poses spiritual risks.
Prof. Christopher Malloy argues that theology, properly understood as a classical science, involves intellectual habits of certain knowledge through causes grounded in faith, integrating poetry and philosophy to guide believers toward truth and beatific union with God.
Prof. Michael Dauphinais explores how Thomas Aquinas integrates philosophical wisdom and divine revelation, showing that genuine knowledge of God arises from both reason and the transformative experience of Christ’s incarnation and the Holy Spirit.
Fr. Philip-Neri Reese examines Thomas Aquinas’s theory of intellectual memory, tracing how Aquinas navigates conflicting authorities and ultimately defends the preservation of intelligible species in the possible intellect.
Fr. Dominic Legge’s lecture traces the theological development of the concept of the Word through Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas, illuminating the evolution of Trinitarian analogy and the nature of human understanding in medieval philosophy.
Dr. Albert von Thurn und Taxis explores the 13th-century reception of Augustine’s account of memory, intellect, and will, analyzing how medieval philosophers navigated the tension between Augustinian and Aristotelian models of the rational soul.
Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini explores the biographical and spiritual connections between Newman and Tolkien, revealing how their shared organic vision of historical development and renewal challenges modern tensions between nostalgia, progress, and Christian identity.
Fr. Cajetan Cuddy explores the relationship between grace and nature, demonstrating how grace perfects, transforms, and preserves the continuity of human nature without destroying its fundamental reality.
Fr. Thomas Davenport examines the philosophical and scientific boundaries between the inanimate and the living, highlighting how Thomistic principles, spontaneous generation, and structured homogeneity offer new ways to understand life’s emergence and complexity.
Prof. John Cuddeback presents Thomistic wisdom for the pilgrimage to God emphasizing the importance of cleaving to the final end—God—as the ultimate rule and measure of all actions, fostering order and peace in the spiritual journey.
Prof. Paige Hochschild explores Thomistic wisdom for the pilgrimage to God, focusing on the virtues required for spiritual journey, the meanings of patience, hope, and memory, and the role of Dante’s Divine Comedy in illuminating the challenges and fulfillment of the pilgrim’s quest.
Prof. Raymond Hain examines whether beauty must be natural, exploring Thomistic metaphysics, twentieth-century debates between Maritain and Gilson, and contemporary examples from architecture and literature to probe the relationship between nature, artifice, and the beautiful.
Prof. Joshua Hochschild examines whether societies are natural by tracing the Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of social forms, arguing that certain social bodies like families and states have intrinsic natures and purposes that fulfill the social aspect of human flourishing.
Fr. John Sica explores whether virtues are natural by examining Aristotle and Aquinas, ultimately concluding that the virtues are not innate qualities, but are rather habituated character states that perfect human nature.
Prof. Catherine Peters addresses the philosophical question of deriving moral ought from descriptive is, arguing from a Thomistic natural law perspective that the essence of human nature grounds objective moral norms, bridging fact and value through teleology and reason.
Prof. Christopher Frey examines the distinctions and interactions between natural and artificial entities, showing how art can complete, imitate, or even subvert nature within Aristotelian and Thomistic frameworks.
Prof. John Brungardt explores the concept of laws of nature as partial transcriptions of the natures of physical substances, emphasizing the interplay between philosophical tradition, scientific discovery, and metaphysical causality.
Fr. Raymund Snyder explores Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics of nature, form, and the scale of being, emphasizing the integration of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions and the unique Christian vision of creation, essence, and intellect.