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.
March 21, 2024
The book shows readers the lived faith of a religious priest in a hockey setting. We find how religious faith has to bring to the public square, whether in its devotion to ageless values or in its belief in transcendence. We discover a religious faith that is rooted in developing human persons, whether in schools, colleges, or ice rinks. We see the human side of religion, one that tries to understand the implications of faith in the real world. For instance, Bauer critiques an overemphasis on skill development in sport because he believes that it limits—even denies—the flourishing of the human person, where players overemphasize know-how without considering their purpose for playing the game.
March 14, 2024
I began to see that even though Aquinas does not spend a lot of time disputing and writing about peace, it is central to his work. It is ultimately the mission of God and so it becomes our mission as well. Aquinas is very explicit on this point and that has personally impacted me deeply. These are, likewise, the two things I hope the reader finds as well, a new appreciation for Aquinas’s works as well as a deeper love and greater commitment to the God of peace.
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.
February 8, 2024
A major goal of this book is to counter this misguided understanding and to invite the reader to enter the world of the ancient Israelite priests, where we discover a vision that is beautiful, challenging, and profoundly relevant for contemporary Christians. What’s more, when we fully immerse ourselves in ancient Jewish temple theology, our appreciation for Christ’s saving work is also dramatically enhanced.
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.
October 26, 2023
The reader should come to understand why ministry to the sick was done. How could sin cause illness? How were sins removed, especially the sins of the dying, through reception of the sacraments?
October 19, 2023
The Saint Anselm Journal publishes both historically based articles on Anselm—along with his predecessors, and those he influenced—and systematic articles on topics of interest to him, such as what we can know about God, the reality of human freedom, and the relations between of faith and reason in the dynamic Catholic intellectual tradition of faith seeking understanding. These systematic articles include studies from the whole history of philosophy and theology.
October 12, 2023
By showing what happens in individual trials of all sorts, the book covers a great deal of social and ecclesiastical and political history.
