Episodes

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 nature. This lecture was given on October 23rd, 2025, at Fordham University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events. About the Speakers: Kevin M. Kambo is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas in...

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 attitudes. This lecture was given on November 13th, 2025, at Fordham University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events. About the Speakers: Steven J Jensen holds the Bishop Nold Chair in Graduate Philosophy at the Univ...

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 proposing a prudent, Thomistic way of living faithfully within contemporary economic systems. This lecture was given on October 30th, 2025, at University of Galway. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events. ...

Prof. George Corbett examines how Dante’s vision of Christian wisdom, politics, and philosophy stands in deep harmony with Aquinas and Pope Leo XIII’s Leonine Thomistic revival, against Etienne Gilson’s charge that Dante shattered both Thomism and Christendom.

Prof. Jonathan I. Lunine presents his life as a planetary scientist and Catholic convert as a lived example of the harmony between faith and science, then highlights two priest‑scientists—Georges Lemaître and Gregor Mendel—whose foundational work on the Big Bang and genetics shows that Catholic belief has stood at the center of modern scientific revolutions.

Dr. Timothy P. Flanigan, M.D., presents Catholic faith and medicine as profoundly harmonious, showing how Christ’s person‑to‑person healing, the Church’s hospital tradition, and a “culture of life” can and must be lived inside today’s secular, therapeutically focused healthcare system—precisely where pressures over abortion, assisted suicide (MAID), and gender interventions create the sharpest conflicts of conscience.

Prof. Lawrence M. Principe argues that the supposed “war” between science and faith is largely a modern myth, constructed in the late 19th century by figures like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White for personal, political, and ideological reasons, then amplified by secularizers, technocratic utopians, and bad theology (especially “God‑of‑the‑gaps” arguments and naive literalism) on the religious side.

Prof. Jonathan Lunine offers a personal and intellectual witness that one can be both a serious planetary scientist and a committed Catholic, describing his journey from Jewish upbringing and “cradle astronomer” to baptism and then to public advocacy against the supposed science–faith conflict.

Prof. Carlos A. Casanova argues that religion—understood as a theological worldview affirming God as the rational creator—is not an enemy but an historical and structural ally of science, since the very rise, methods, and institutional homes of the sciences (from Plato and Aristotle through medieval universities to Galileo) developed within religious cultures that prized truth for its own sake.

Fr. Philip-Neri Reese argues that while grimdark fantasy (exemplified by George R. R. Martin) can be just as true artistically as Tolkien-style classic fantasy, it is necessarily less good in the fullest Thomistic sense because it structurally valorizes nihilism and hopelessness rather than ordering the imagination toward God and real moral hope.

Prof. Lee Oser portrays the Inklings—and especially J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis—as a countercultural circle of Christian writers and scholars whose friendship, medieval learning, and shared experience of war grounded a robust Christian imagination that resisted modern secularism by telling better, theologically rich stories.

Prof. Lee Oser argues that Christian humanism—the “radical middle” between secularism and sectarianism—offers the best key to Shakespeare’s plays, showing how Julius Caesar and Hamlet dramatize our tragic ignorance about the fate of the soul and the limits of pagan and early modern attempts to know ourselves without fully knowing God.

Prof. Joshua Hochschild shows how Dante’s Paradiso offers a philosophically rich, Thomistic, and Neoplatonic vision of the cosmos in which goodness, truth, beauty, and peace name both God’s own life and the ordered, participatory structure of creation that our rational desire seeks to know and love.

Prof. George Corbett presents Dante’s Divine Comedy as a transformative “journey of desire” in which the passionate intellect—shaped by Virgil (reason) and Beatrice (grace)—leads the sinner from the dark wood of sin and ignorance through Hell and Purgatory to the ordered love and beatific hope of Paradise.

Dr. Robert McNamara presents Edith Stein and Thomistic personalism as a unified vision in which the human face reveals the mystery of the person as both substantial “what” and subjective “who,” integrating Aquinas’s account of rational nature with phenomenological insights into consciousness, interiority, and personal encounter.

Prof. W. Scott Cleveland explains how food and alcohol can either undermine or promote true happiness, arguing that gluttony is a disordered desire for the pleasures of eating and drinking that disrupts health, friendship, and virtuous living rather than their proper role in a flourishing, festal life.

Dr. R.J. Snell argues that the real epidemic behind student anxiety, boredom, and frenzied achievement is not laziness but sloth—a refusal of responsibility and a sadness at the divine good—that resists joy, commitment, and genuine happiness.

Fr. Gregory Pine shows how money, pleasure, and influence all fail as ultimate goals and argues that true happiness comes from living in accord with our nature as creatures made for communion with God through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

Prof. Jerome Foss argues that what Americans call the “Bill of Rights” is not a true bill of rights but a set of constitutional amendments best understood within a Federalist—and broadly Thomistic—vision of law, liberty, and the common good that resists reducing politics to individual rights talk.

Prof. Joshua Hochschild shows how St. John Henry Newman’s lifelong “struggle against liberalism” is best understood as an Aristotelian critique of false views of knowledge, in which liberalism reduces religion to private sentiment and denies the knowability of first principles, rather than as a merely political or ecclesiastical stance.

Fr. Anselm Ramelow explains how, in a Thomistic framework, miracles are graded by how they surpass nature and why only God can perform the highest-level miracles of creation and resurrection, while finite spirits—including demons—can produce lesser “signs” that must be carefully discerned.

Prof. Chad Pecknold shows how St. Augustine’s Confessions should be read as a Catholic, sacramental account of conversion in which the “altar of the heart” is turned toward God and united to Christ’s Eucharistic sacrifice, rather than as a merely emotional, garden-conversion memoir.

Fr. Irenaeus Dunlevy introduces the medieval Dominican mystics of the Rhineland and, in dialogue with Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius, shows how their often strikingly apophatic language about abyss, detachment, and “ground” can be critically integrated into a Trinitarian, Eucharistic vision of Christian mystical union.

Dr. Bronwen McShea uncovers the rich but often forgotten history of Catholic women in the arts and sciences, showing how figures from late antiquity through the early modern period—nuns, scholars, patrons, and university professors—have long made serious intellectual and cultural contributions within the Catholic tradition.