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 an...
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 ins...
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 becau...
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 robu...
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 ...
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, participa...
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 ignor...
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, an...
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 g...
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 ...
This lecture was given on October 9th, 2025, at University of Michigan. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events . About the Speakers: Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philo...
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 de...
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, ra...
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...
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 prof...
Prof. Christopher Tollefsen argues from a Thomistic natural law perspective that it is always morally wrong to intend the death of an innocent human being, contending that this absolute norm binds both private individuals and...
Prof. Kenneth Kemp reexamines the Scopes “Monkey Trial” to show that it has been mythologized into evidence of a supposed war between science and religion, arguing instead that the real conflicts concerned constitutional law, educational policy, and competing theological and philosophical visions w…
Prof. Jonathan I. Lunine recounts his life as a planetary scientist, tracing how early inspirations from Carl Sagan and the space race led to his work on major NASA missions exploring the solar system and distant worlds, from Voyager and Cassini to Juno and Europa Clipper.
Fr. Dominic Legge distinguishes the classical Catholic doctrine of creation from modern creationism by showing how a robust Thomistic account of God as the transcendent cause of all being avoids conflict with evolutionary science while deepening our understanding of what it means for the world to b…
Prof. Karin Öberg reflects on her journey from atheism to Catholicism and explains how the vocation of a Catholic scientist and professor involves uniting rigorous scientific inquiry with the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to contemplate God through creation and to renew the life of the u…
Prof. Michael Dauphinais explains what contemporary culture needs to learn from Thomas Aquinas, arguing for a metaphysics of communion in which God, family, Church, and society are not locked in competition but share common goods that make each more fully alive.
Fr. Alan O’Sullivan unpacks Aquinas on the good life, explaining why wealth, power, fame, and pleasure cannot be our ultimate happiness and how true beatitude is found in virtuous activity ordered to God.
Fr. Irenaeus Dunlevy introduces Aquinas’ Five Ways, showing how arguments from motion, causality, contingency, gradation, and teleology lead from everyday experience to the rational conclusion that God exists as first mover, first cause, necessary being, supreme perfection, and intelligent governor.
Prof. Christopher Tollefsen explains John Paul II on euthanasia, showing how the Pope’s vision of human life as a sacred gift, bearing God’s image and destined for eternal friendship with Him, rules out any claim to a right to kill oneself or others.