Prof. Chris Baglow explores how the God of love can allow evil and suffering by showing that a world created for freedom and love—not as a deterministic machine—necessarily entails the risk of physical and moral evils, yet op...
Prof. Paul Gondreau explores how Christ’s concrete, fully human life uniquely “fully reveals man to himself,” showing that every human person and all of history are teleologically ordered to him as the final Adam and measure ...
Dr. Robert McNamara explores how creation is not a distant event but our very act of existing here and now, so that each person’s being is itself a continuous relation of absolute dependence on God that can be freely understo...
Dr. Erik Dempsey explores whether we make morality or discover it by unpacking Aquinas’s three natural inclinations and arguing that they ground objective, inescapable moral obligations rather than mere social conventions. Th...
Prof. John Cuddeback reflects on why many students feel relationally unsatisfied in a hyper-connected world and shows how reclaiming embodied presence, intentional discernment of a few trustworthy friends, and technology-limi...
Prof. Michael Krom explores how athletic rivalry, when rooted in justice and love of the good, can deepen genuine friendship, build virtue, and lead toward a contemplative vision of life. This lecture was given on November 13...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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-…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.