April 26, 2024
Following Ratzinger’s lead, I would say that the question ought not to be how we can defend the faithful against the advances of this science but rather how we can engage in dialogue with it so as to more deeply penetrate the mysteries of the Christian faith and, in turn, illumine the science with our faith.
April 18, 2024
We are delighted to have William H. Marshner join us on the blog to discuss his newly released translation of Cardinal Cajetan’s Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: Prima Pars. The translation is divided into three separate free-standing volumes. William H. Marshner is Professor Emeritus of Theology, Christendom College, and the editor and translator of Defending the Faith: An Anti-Modernist Anthology (CUA Press).
April 12, 2024
One of the most important, but also most challenging arguments in the book is that the actions of rational, free agents (like humans and God) are what they are because of what the agent means by them. And so while the first half of the book is concerned with a metaphysical question about how it can be that God acts in human action, in the second half, we eventually turn to the question, what is God doing in human action? And this question requires that theology be not only a metaphysical enterprise, but also a hermeneutical one. In other words, we need to be able to interpret what God means by what God is doing in human action. And because the earlier part of the book establishes that there are not parts of creation where God is not acting—God, after all, is the maker of “all things”—that means that the data for this hermeneutical project are given not just in some particular “religious” area of human action, nor in one particular institution or one culture or one community, but in and through all of the product of human action in every human community in every place and every time. It means that the theological enterprise, considered at its most fundamental level (and my book is probably best understood as a work of “fundamental theology”), is as wide and deep and tall as human history itself.
April 4, 2024
Venerable Fulton Sheen once famously said that “there are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be—which is, of course, quite a different thing.” This is true for people of every nation of the world throughout history since the Church’s founding by Christ. Although the Catholic Church exists in the world and is encountered by people of every nation and tongue, her true nature and mission is nevertheless opaque to most, especially in our modern world that rejects not only divine revelation but even natural knowledge of God obtainable by reason. Rather than perceiving a mystery that contains the presence of God and provides us with the means to attain our perfect happiness in him, many see the Church as an outdated human institution that limits, and even threatens, our freedom. This raises the question of the proper understanding of the Church. What is the nature of the Church and what is her mission? Charles Cardinal Journet, who authored a scientific and sapiential treatise on the Church in the last century, L’Église du Verbe incarné, outlines three different ways of perceiving the Church that correspond to how one regards Christ.
February 29, 2024
MacGreevy’s poetry and criticism redescribes the modern world in terms of Augustine’s theory of the Two Cities. Coffey, who studied with Maritain and at one point taught Aquinas at Saint Louis University, saw the neo-Thomist revival as a way to save modern persons from the suicide of Kantian idealism; Aquinas’s understanding of being as gift, as intelligible and so capable of giving itself, by way of form, to be known by intellects saves us from solipsism, skepticism, and madness. For MacGreevy and Coffey, Samuel Beckett represented that fateful solipsism if Aquinas’s insights were ignored. Go figure. They were very close friends. Coffey and Beckett were even golf partners. It would be hard to understand the meaning of Beckett’s work without seeing how it engaged, and was fruitfully engaged by, Coffey’s Thomistic philosophy. For Devlin, Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal understood the modern age as few others could. They saw the chaos of historical experience and realized that mankind could not be saved by any external development, including political justice.
December 4, 2023
We hope that our essays demonstrate that despite their use of allegory or the like these authors did not treat scripture in an arbitrary manner, reading into the text whatever they saw fit, but rather, they worked within well-established paradigms inherited by their training in the pagan Greco-Roman schoolrooms of grammar and rhetoric. These ancient Christian authors were also those who worked with scripture carefully as they articulated some of the most foundational teachings of the Christian tradition, such as the relationship between the Father and the Son or the two natures of Christ.
August 17, 2023
A change almost too subtle to be described passed over her companion’s face. It was only a slight contraction of delicate lines about the long narrow eyes, denoting an increase of interest and alertness at this announcement. She was sitting on a low chair, nearer to the fire than her visitor. She now turned towards her, as if expecting to hear more.
August 9, 2023
The CUA Press is pleased to kick off our new book season with the release of our Fall/Winter 2023-2024 catalog! Here are just a few of the exciting upcoming titles you can look forward to reading.
July 27, 2023
In the Catholic Church of the early nineteenth century, no formal and absolute condemnation of slavery as an institution existed. Although recognizing abuses in the system, the Church did not see slavery as a moral evil in itself but as a result of original sin.
June 8, 2023
They got married. I was born on a Good Friday afternoon, and Mama died on the joyous morning of the Resurrection amid the hallelujah fireworks. Covered with gillyflowers, she lies in the cemetery of Viana do Castelo, in a humid lane near the wall shadowed by weeping willows, where she liked taking summer afternoon walks with her shaggy little dog named Traviata.
