Saint Thomas Aquinas

  • Obeying Unjust Laws

    St. Thomas defines law in Summa Theologiae I-II q. 90 aa. 1-4. It is an ordinance of reason for the sake of the common good made by someone bestowed with the care of the common good and promulgated. Hence, human law, which St. Thomas treats in I-II q. 95, must share the above definition in…

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  • Tradition and Technology

    Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness.  Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history.  Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which…

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  • On Natural Law and Justice

    In his work Introduction to Moral Theology, Fr. Romanus Cessario O.P. remarked on certain misconceptions with respect to how the natural had grown in application and importance over time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: arguing that the presentation of the natural law given in teaching manuals was anachronistic and unhelpful, and in…

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  • Last Chance to Register for Fall Seminars

    With discussion sessions beginning this coming Saturday (9/23), I would be remiss if I did not put out a final call for registration in our Fall seminars. We have three provocative offerings, each of which promises to confront the errors of modernity in radically differing ways. An Encounter with the Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Excerpt…

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  • On Analogy

    A Brief Primer on the Doctrine’s Confusion Few topics have brought as much consternation to Thomists than that of analogy; not only those living and writing in the contemporary period (subsequent, that is, to the Leonine revival initiated in 1879), but stretching back to the first fluorescence of Thomism begun in the late fourteenth century,…

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  • Marshall McLuhan on the History of the Trivium

    …the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among them for ascendancy.  Ancient grammar was at odds with the dialectics of Plato and, especially, of Aristotle, as the art of interpreting phenomena.  As the method of patristic theology, grammar enjoyed uninterrupted ascendancy until the revival of dialectics by Gerbert, Roscellinus, and…

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  • The Problem of Christian Philosophy

    In the second of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia in 2022, we present Dr. James Capehart, who brings us discussion of Christian Philosophy as it has been viewed in the Christian Middle Ages as well as transmitted through the debates of the 20th century. How in fact is Christian philosophy a problem? The wording itself has…

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