Episodes

Dec. 29, 2025

Friendship and the Digital Age: A Thomistic Reflection on Human Conne…

Prof. Joshua Hochschild argues that digital culture reshapes friendship and attention through Curiositas and acedia, offering a path of renewal by cultivating virtue, mindful leisure, and rooted communal belonging. This lectu...

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Dec. 26, 2025

Why Get Married? The Catholic View of the Meaning and Purpose of Marr…

Prof. Michael Dauphinais explains marriage as a lifelong covenant of self-giving love between a man and a woman that images Christ’s union with the Church, ordered to the spouses’ sanctification and the procreation and educat...

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Dec. 25, 2025

Why Did God Become Man? The Absolute Primacy of Christ According to B…

Prof. Thomas Ward explains Scotus’s bold claim that the Incarnation is not primarily a response to human sin, but the centerpiece of God’s eternal plan for creation, so that Christ would have become incarnate even if Adam had...

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Dec. 24, 2025

Participation in the Divine Nature: Aquinas and the Catholic Vision o…

Fr. Gregory Pine explains that, according to Aquinas, Christians are called to true divinization or theosis: by grace and the sacraments they really come to share in God’s own life without becoming God by nature, growing into...

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Dec. 23, 2025

What Difference Did Christianity Make? Why the Ancient Greeks, Romans…

Fr. Terence Crotty argues that Christianity spread so rapidly because it uniquely answered the human search for truth and happiness while transforming social life through charity, dignity for slaves and women, and a compellin...

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Dec. 22, 2025

The Disappearing Man: Body, Soul, and the Question of Who We Are – Dr…

Dr. Paul LaPenna uses the dramatic case of a man in a coma from autoimmune brain disease to show that personal identity endures despite severe loss of abilities, arguing from neurology and Thomistic philosophy that a human pe...

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Dec. 19, 2025

Rebutting Necessitarian Universalism: Three Thomistic Arguments – Pro…

Prof. Mats Wahlberg argues that “necessitarian universalism”—the claim that hell is metaphysically impossible and that God must save all rational creatures—is incompatible with core Christian metaphysical commitments, and he ...

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Dec. 18, 2025

Reprobation and Permission of Sin – Prof. Thomas Osborne

Prof. Thomas Osborne explains reprobation and the permission of sin in Thomas Aquinas as the asymmetrical counterpart to predestination, where God positively causes the grace and merits leading the elect to glory but only per...

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Dec. 17, 2025

Aquinas's Interpretation of Predestination in Scripture – Fr. Piotr R…

Fr. Piotr Roszak shows how Thomas Aquinas interprets predestination through a deeply biblical lens, reading predestination as God’s merciful, Christ-centered plan to lead creation freely to a supernatural end and insisting th...

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Dec. 16, 2025

Why is Thomism so Fixated on Predestination? – Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P.

Fr. Cajetan Cuddy explains that Thomism is “fixated” on predestination because this doctrine lies at the speculative and practical center of the Thomistic vision of reality, uniting its key philosophical principles and theolo...

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Dec. 15, 2025

What is predestination? – Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

Fr. Dominic Legge explains predestination as a profoundly hopeful Catholic doctrine rooted in God’s eternal, loving plan to give grace and lead rational creatures freely to the supernatural end of the beatific vision, drawing...

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Dec. 12, 2025

Does Nature Make Laws? – Prof. Raymond Hain

Prof. Raymond Hain examines whether nature “makes” laws by exploring classical and contemporary accounts of natural law, arguing that human moral norms arise from our rational participation in the ordered structure of life and the universe as understood in both philosophy and Catholic thought.

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Dec. 11, 2025

'The greatest of all God's works': Justification in Catholic Theology…

Prof. Matthew Thomas explains why justification—God’s transformative act of making sinners righteous in Christ by grace through faith and incorporation into the Church—is, for Aquinas, greater even than creation, and explores how Catholic teaching on faith, works, and grace can address Reformation-…

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Dec. 10, 2025

Can Divine Providence Be Known Through Natural Reason? The Classics' …

Prof. Carlos A. Casanova argues that a properly understood Aristotelian–Platonic metaphysics of form, final causality, and nature allows human reason, without biblical revelation, to infer a governing divine intellect that orders the cosmos and human history in a providential way.​

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Dec. 9, 2025

Living Mary's Mediation through De Montfort’s 'Total Consecration' – …

Fr. John Langlois presents Saint Louis de Montfort’s Marian spirituality of “total consecration” as the surest, easiest, and most secure way to live Mary’s maternal mediation and grow in intimate union with Jesus by entrusting one’s whole life to her.

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Dec. 8, 2025

The History of Devotion to Mary: She Who Leads Us to Jesus – Fr. John…

Fr. John Langlois traces how Marian doctrine and devotion—from Scripture and the early Fathers through medieval councils, liturgy, and architecture—culminate in the rosary as a Christ-centered, biblically rooted prayer that brings believers to Jesus through Mary’s maternal intercession.

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Dec. 6, 2025

Is Free Will an Illusion? – Prof. Joshua Hochschild

Prof. Joshua Hochschild argues that free will is not an illusion but a real, rational power by which human beings participate in God’s causality, and that the supposed “problem of free will” arises from a reductive modern picture of causation and human nature rather than from the classical Aristote…

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Dec. 4, 2025

Happiness and Virtue: Can it be Good for You to Be Bad? – Prof. Thom…

Prof. Thomas Osborne argues that, on an Aristotelian–Thomistic account of human nature, it is never truly good for you to be bad, because vice damages your very being as a rational, social creature ordered to common goods and ultimately to God.

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Dec. 3, 2025

Virtue and the Meaningful Life – Dr. David McPherson

Dr. David McPherson argues that human beings are “meaning-seeking animals” and that an adequate neo-Aristotelian ethics must see the virtues as constitutive of a meaningful life ordered to strong goods such as the noble, the sacred, and love of God and neighbor.​

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Dec. 2, 2025

St. Thomas Aquinas: His Life, Wisdom, and Relevance Today – Fr. Irena…

Fr. Irenaeus Dunlevy presents Aquinas as a medieval theologian whose love of Scripture, clear metaphysics of happiness, integrated view of body and soul, and profound Eucharistic devotion offer urgently needed guidance for Christians facing modern confusion about truth, identity, and God.

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Dec. 1, 2025

Why We Need the Saints – Prof. Adam Eitel

Prof. Adam Eitel argues that God’s divine pedagogy makes the examples of the saints indispensable for our salvation, since their concrete, imperfect yet graced lives teach us how to endure sorrow, grow in virtue, and imitate Christ in the real circumstances of our own time.

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Nov. 28, 2025

Does Marketing Make Us Less Human? – Dr. John-Paul Heil

Dr. John-Paul Heil critiques modern marketing’s implicit anthropology, explaining that marketing driven by manipulation, simulation, and quantity undermines human dignity, authentic friendship, and the pursuit of truth, advoc...

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Nov. 27, 2025

A Breastplate of Stillness and a Book of Thanksgiving: The Fruits of …

Prof. Carl Vennerstrom explores how perseverance, prayer, ordered work, and thanksgiving transform boredom and the temptation to acedia into opportunities for deep spiritual growth, joy, and resilient virtue in an age of digi...

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Nov. 26, 2025

Theology of the Body – Prof. Paige Hochschild

Prof. Paige Hochschild analyzes John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, contrasting the Catholic vision of bodily integration, purity, and vocation with both contemporary purity culture and philosophical dualism to reveal how gr...

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