Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau presents the Catholic disagreement over honoring Truman as a serious moral dispute rooted in differing judgments about just war, innocent life, and the necessity of the atomic bomb. This lecture was given...
Prof. Michael Krom argues that just war principles still govern contemporary warfare, especially drone warfare and autonomous weapons, and that moral judgment cannot be replaced by technology or legal convenience. This lectur...
Prof. Michael Krom argues that just war theory remains morally necessary today because war must be judged by justice, right intention, and the common good rather than by realpolitik, legal minimalism, or national self-interes...
Prof. Thomas Ward argues that Stoicism offers valuable detachment and moral discipline, but Boethius and Christianity deepen it by reordering the human person toward friendship, hope, and beatitude in God. This lecture was gi...
This lecture was given on February 12th, 2026, at Vanderbilt University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events . About the Speakers: Dr. Lydia Dugdale is the Silberberg Pr...
This lecture was given on March 5th, 2026, at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events . About the Speakers: Dr. Heereman was born and r...
This lecture was given on March 12th, 2026, at University of Edinburgh. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events . About the Speakers: Rik Van Nieuwenhove is Professor of Med...
Prof. Christopher Frey argues that Stoicism offers real insights about freedom and detachment from externals, but its ideal of self-sufficient serenity risks flattening human emotion, moral life, and the need for grace. This ...
Sr. Anna Wray argues that sorrow can either deform the soul as acedia or save it when rightly faced, and she offers a Thomistic account of how sorrow, friendship with God, and spiritual remedies shape the Christian life. This...
This lecture was given on February 19th, 2026, at University of Tulsa. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events . About the Speakers: Fr. Stephen Ryan was born and raised in ...
Prof. Michael Dauphinais contends that modern Christians, formed by empiricism, individualism, and a this‑worldly hope that easily turns to despair, especially need the Eucharist because it is the concrete, sacramental way Ch...
Prof. Gavin D’Costa explains how, since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has rethought its relationship to Judaism by affirming the enduring validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, recovering the Church’s identity a...
Prof. Michael Root argues that, in Catholic theology, we are saved wholly by the unmerited grace of Christ, and that this grace brings us into a Spirit‑given life of faith, hope, love, and morally significant works, so that e...
Fr. Dominic Langevin defends the Catholic priesthood as a divinely willed, sacramental system of mediation in which ordained men, configured to Christ the High Priest, bestow God’s gifts on the faithful and offer their prayer...
Fr. John Baptist Ku unpacks St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of predestination, showing how God’s universal salvific will, efficacious grace, and real human freedom coexist without collapsing into Calvinist double predestination...
Prof. Thomas Osborne clarifies how, for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the distinctive immateriality of human intellectual knowledge grounds a philosophical case for the soul’s immortality, going beyond today’s narrower “p...
Prof. Marshall Bierson uses Aristotle’s distinction between work, play, and deeper “energetic” activities to argue that friendship and contemplation uniquely allow us to “rest” in what is truly good and meaningful, and then s...
Dr. Erik Dempsey explains how St. Thomas Aquinas sees pleasure as a natural and God-given part of the good life, one that both signals our true human ends and yet must be disciplined by temperance in a fallen world. This lect...
Prof. Timothy O’Connor examines why an all-loving, omnipotent God permits horrendous suffering and explores how, within a Christian framework, such evils can be “defeated” and taken up into the communion of saints as part of ...
Sr. Mary Madeline Todd draws upon Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and friendship with Christ in order to show that sharing a common journey and life, together with mutual self-gift, turns everyday relationships into true, virt...
Dr. R. J. Snell analyzes our “burnout society” as an achievement-obsessed culture that drives people to anxiety, depression, and exhaustion by demanding endless self-optimization while starving them of leisure, contemplation,...
Dr. Kevin Kambo argues that our culture has moved from a “dictatorship of relativism” to a “tyranny of pathos,” in which appeals to hurt feelings and empathy displace reasoned deliberation about truth, justice, and human natu...
Prof. Steven Jensen argues that right and wrong are not just a matter of opinion by defending moral realism over moral relativism, showing that moral truths are grounded in human nature and goals rather than mere subjective a...
Fr. Jacques Benoit-Rauscher explores whether the Catholic Church is truly anti-capitalist by clarifying how Catholic social doctrine distinguishes legitimate market structures from the problematic “spirit of capitalism” and p...