Gregory of Nyssa’s critiques of various forms of social injustice hinge on his rigorous theological anthropology. For Gregory, slavery, the accumulation of wealth, and the mistreatment of the poor are evil because they deny the freedom proper to human creatures created according to the divine Image. However, Gregory’s anthropology also contains, we will argue, a distinct account of the ways in which humanity’s difference from God – particularly its poverty and limitation – reveals important aspects of the particular and ultimately Christological mode in which finite humans imitate the infinitude God. The aim of this present essay is to articulate how both likeness and unlikeness to God – mirrors of God and mirrors of death – are integral to Gregory’s theological anthropology as it pertains to various forms of social critique.

McNabb and DeVito have recently argued that Graham Oppy’s objections to the First Way are found wanting. In response, McNabb and DeVito restructured the First Way on behalf of St Thomas. More recently, Joseph Schmid and Daniel Linford argue that the restructured argument given by McNabb and DeVito is problematic, claiming that it is either valid but unmotivated or it is plainly invalid. In this paper, I argue that McNabb and DeVito’s schematic glossing of the First Way is both valid and motivated.

This article outlines one way in which Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology could contribute to reducing the risk humanity now creates to its own survival. Studies of ‘Existential Risk’ warn that hazards arising from Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Engineered Pathogens require mitigation to safeguard the future of the human race from a calamitous end. Preventative measures, however, entail sacrifice, and there is no shortage of resistance to regulation of behaviours and technological development. Ethics of empathy, utility, and duties reach breaking point when stretched to overcome the temporal and moral gap between present agency and future well-being.

This article proposes that Ratzinger’s theology of history and commitment to eschatological realism offers an intertwined double benefit: his warning about the danger of conflating hope in God’s Kingdom with hope in a future world humanity could perfect for itself opens up the uniquely rich ground of a trans-historical hope in Jesus Christ, in which an impactful relationship of love for humanity’s future can put down roots today.

This paper brings together several issues in Aquinas’s thought on God’s primary causality, providence, and the reading of scripture. Herein I argue that God’s primary causality is to be understood in terms of His being the source of all actuality. From there I go on to integrate Aquinas’s account of providence with the account of God’s primacy. With God’s primary causality and providence in place, I then go on to address the theme pertinent to this special edition, and that is God’s response to sin in Aquinas’s reading of scripture.

A Christian approach to suffering, sin, and evil cannot offer now a full theodicy. We now ‘know in part’ only regarding divine purposes in allowing suffering, sin, and evil. We can clarify instead how God interacts in righteousness with people as their God of promise and voucher in the midst of suffering, sin, and evil. To that end, this article illuminates a divine effort toward human reconciliation with God in righteousness and resurrection, despite our gaps in explaining suffering, sin, and evil. It identifies current reconciliation with God and resurrection by God that do not fully explain suffering, sin, and evil, but can be a voucher now in human experience and life for eventual eschatological reparations promised by God. If the Spirit of God can be such a voucher, so also can the reconciliation and resurrection now empowered by that Spirit. This article recognizes a special role for the divine ‘fruit of the Spirit’ identified by Paul. It also explains how this role figures in spiritual resurrection with Christ now, in advance of any resurrection of the body. The article contends that the spiritual resurrection in question emerges through reconciliation with God now in volitional cooperation with God’s unique moral personality traits.

While ‘the meaning of life’ has grown in prominence as a topic of philosophical inquiry, few Thomists have addressed it. Joshua Hochschild has recently offered a plausible explanation, arguing that ‘the meaning of life’ is a late modern ‘invention’, at home in a conceptual framework both philosophically problematic and incompatible with the principles of St. Thomas’ thought. He, therefore, counsels Catholic intellectuals to avoid the question of life’s meaning. I argue in contrast that St. Thomas offers the kind of metaphysical perspective that originally made ‘the meaning of life’ intelligible. First, I show that closer attention to the context in which the phrase emerges (that of German Romanticism) can clarify why much of the modern discourse on ‘the meaning of life’ succumbs to Hochschild’s critique. I then show that, even in the writings of its earliest modern proponents, we find compelling reasons to hold that ‘the meaning of life’ was always more at home within a Christian conceptual framework. Finally, I argue that St. Thomas’ account of providence and divine art in particular explain the purposefulness and significance of the world, such that Thomists who appeal to these notions are well positioned to address the question of life’s meaning in contemporary philosophical debates.

‘The Sequence on the Virgin Mary and Christ’, by the poet and martyr St Robert Southwell, S.J. (1561–95), is a beautiful work that is generally still undervalued. The sequence explores the physical, moral, and emotional unity of Mary and her Son in the work of our salvation. The larger context is the Protestant devaluing of hyperdulia. In its historical moment – it was written sometime in the 1580s – it is a subtle exploration of the theme of kenosis and of what a ‘prince’ or ‘queen’ should really be. While being relatively inexplicit, Southwell seems to poise the Virgin Mary against that other ‘empress’, Elizabeth I, and writes with intimacy from the perspective of his own self-understanding as ‘Beatae Virginis filius’ (a son of the Blessed Virgin). The sequence’s modern, editorial title needs to be replaced with one that matches its devotional aims and content. As he faced up to the almost certain prospect of his own martyrdom, Southwell looked to Mary as true mother and queen to sustain him in his sacrifice.

Given the peculiarly linguistic approach that contemporary philosophers use to apply St. Thomas Aquinas’s arguments on the immateriality of the human soul, this paper will present a Thomistic-inspired evaluation of whether artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) chatbots’ composition and linguistic performance justify the assertion that AI/ML chatbots have immaterial souls. The first section of the paper will present a strong, but ultimately crucially flawed argument that AI/ML chatbots do have souls based on contemporary Thomistic argumentation. The second section of the paper will provide an overview of the actual computer science models that make artificial neural networks and AI/ML chatbots function, which I hope will assist other theologians and philosophers writing about technology, The third section will present some of Emily Bender’s and Alexander Koller’s objections to AI/ML chatbots being able to access meaning from computational linguistics. The final section will highlight the similarities of Bender’s and Koller’s argument to a fuller presentation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument for the immateriality of the human soul, ultimately arguing that the current mechanisms and linguistic activity of AI/ML programming do not constitute activity sufficient to conclude that they have immaterial souls on the strength of St. Thomas’s arguments.

This contribution proposes an interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of mathematics. It is argued that Aquinas’s philosophy of mathematics is a coherent view whose main features enable us to understand it as a moderate realism according to which mathematical objects have an esse intentionale. This esse intentionale involves both mathematicians’ intellectual activity and natural things being knowable mathematically. It is shown that, in Aquinas’s view, mathematics’ constructive part does not conflict with mathematical realism. It is also held that mathematics’ imaginative reasoning is coherent with Aquinas’s doctrine of formal abstraction and his realistism. It focuses on some of Aquinas’s texts, which it places within their textual and doctrinal context and interprets them in the light of some historical elements.

This paper will offer a new defense in response to the problem of natural evil, called the Perfect Will defense. The defense argues that in sustaining the universe, God conforms the system of physical laws to his intellect and will. Yet, God could not fully conform the system of laws (for our universe) to his intellect and will without simultaneously forcing people into a loving relation with God. Yet, since God would not force people to love him, God must thereby initially create people in a universe that has a system of laws that is only partially conformed to God’s intellect and will. However, while a universe with a system of laws that is only partially conformed to God’s intellect and will allows for people to exercise their freedom over their relation with God, it also results in the occurrence of natural evils. The paper will argue that once this defense is fully developed, it is able to account for why God allows for natural evils to occur within the universe. The paper will outline the defense, as well as respond to the defense’s major objections.

Repentance is central to the message of Christianity. Yet, repentance has received little analysis in recent scholarship despite being emphasized by the church fathers. In particular, there has been minimal effort to understand the necessity of repentance in light of Christ’s atoning work. With this as the background, I explore fundamental questions such as repentance’s definition, scope, and role in salvation history. Furthermore, I attempt to more precisely outline repentance’s role in Christ’s salvific work. Underpinning the project is my view that repentance should be understood as metanoia or transformation. This transformation of repentance is ordered toward divine metanoia – participation in Christ. In developing repentance, I put forward a synthesis of Thomas Aquinas’s framework of penance and John McLeod Campbell’s account of Christ’s vicarious repentance. Through this synthesis, I attempt to make sense of the relationship between repentance and atonement. I finish by suggesting that it would be appropriate to conclude that Thomas would endorse a vicarious repentance account of the atonement and hint at how it might fit into broader soteriologies.

This essay endeavors a correlation between Bernard Lonergan’s ‘four-point hypothesis’ – a theological proposal integrating trinitarian theology and the supernatural order of ‘created grace’ – and the sacraments of initiation. The same formal structure that Lonergan discerned in the experience of grace, itself a means of participation in the life of the Trinity, is replicated in the sacramental reception of that grace in those ritual acts whereby one is made a Christian. This at once serves as a ‘proof of concept’, lending credence to the Lonerganian proposal, and provides a speculative framework for understanding how it is that the sacraments introduce Christians into the divine life.

Recently, Luis R. G. Oliveira has developed the ‘symmetry challenge’ as follows:

1. (1) If God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e (the ‘reasons’ thesis).

2. (2) If God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e, then we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e as well (symmetry thesis).

3. (3) So, if God exists, then for all actual instances of e, we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e (Oliveira, 2023).

Thus, per Oliveira, given God’s sovereignty over evil, there is no ethical asymmetry which would compel a moral agent to prevent rather than permit a preventable evil. In this paper, I will defend the asymmetry claim and argue that Oliveira’s argument ultimately fails. First, I will sketch Oliveira’s argument. Then, I will briefly articulate a broadly Reformed-Thomistic model of providence which I will deploy in this article. Third, I will argue that this model of providence and the ethical aim of the Christian life generate two distinct yet inter-related reasons to hold to the asymmetry claim. Finally, I will canvas several theodicies my model rules out and anticipate several objections.

Significant attention has been devoted to the problem of ‘divine hiddenness’ proposed by JL Schellenberg. I propose a novel response that involves denying part of the empirical premise in divine hiddenness arguments, which holds that nonresistant nonbelievers are capable of relationship with God. While Plantinga and others in ‘reformed’ epistemology have at times appealed to original sin as an explanation for divine hiddenness, such responses might seem outlandish to many, given the way that many find nonbelievers to be no more or less epistemically or morally blameworthy than believers. Further, such appeals to original sin seem to give a ‘just-so’ story that at least leaves the situation dialectically balanced. I show that a classically Augustinian notion of original sin can provide a sufficient response to those objections, and that appeal to original sin can form an empirically grounded response to the divine hiddenness problem, beyond a simple defense. If the possibility of original sin-type scenarios is compatible with God’s perfect love, then the phenomenon of apparently nonresistant nonbelievers would push us toward considering the possibility that humans have lost those capacities for relationship with God by a Fall-like event in the past.

Cartesian pictures of the human self and act-centred understandings of ethics dominate modern thought. Throughout his work, Herbert McCabe challenges these, and as such remains an important resource for philosophical and theological ethics. This paper lays out McCabe’s philosophical anthropology, showing how he draws on Wittgenstein to revive a Thomist account of the human person. It then shows how this anthropology feeds into a philosophical ethics, focused on human flourishing and the possibility of life being meaningful. This, in turn, underwrites a theological ethics, according to which the human person flourishes ultimately through graced participation in the divine life. The paper concludes with a discussion of McCabe’s account of faith as participation in the divine self-knowledge.

Although the theology of Tradition of the Dominican Yves Congar was highly influential in drafting the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum at the Second Vatican Council, postconciliar debates neglected some of the most original aspects of this theology. This article proposes a retrieval of the notion of Tradition as ‘milieu éducatif’, advanced by the theologian in Tradition and Traditions, as a valuable resource for contemporary discussions on Christian formation. It intends to highlight how Congar connected the theological realities of revelation and its transmission by the Church with the concrete practice of Christian life. This notion is, then, put in conversation with contemporary Christian thinkers who have reflected on the practical aspects of Christian formation, chiefly James K.A. Smith. This dialogue aims to show the relevance of Congar’s notion to current discussions. While the theology of Tradition exposed by the French Dominican can be completed and specified by current proposals, it can also offer a new theological depth to those proposals.

Catholic social thought and teaching is sometimes conceptualised using an historical or principles-based approach. This paper proposes an alternative framing, construing Catholic social teaching (CST) as a multi-layered phenomenon that can be grouped into three broad tiers, each with a distinctive role. This framing is not intended to supercede the others, nor is it inconsistent with them. The proposal emerges out of a series of discussions hosted by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, a Catholic UK-based development agency, member of Caritas Internationalis, and an official agency of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. The paper operates on two levels simultaneously: it attempts a distinctive reframing of CST using a distinctive source, and it attempts an enactment of CST methodologically and structurally. Construing CST as a multi-layered phenomenon that can be grouped into three broad tiers provides a clarity that empowers us in two ways. First, it clarifies the distinctive role of CST at each level. Second, it makes clear that CST is a work of the Spirit rather than a human phenomenon. Such an understanding of CST brings out with particular clarity a vision of the role, purpose, and even the agency of Catholic social thought in relation to a troubled world.

This paper introduces Phenomenological Thomism by accomplishing the three tasks Thomas Aquinas sets for every prooemium. First, to promote goodwill (beniuolus), it shows how fruitful Phenomenological Thomism promises to be by arguing that it unites the strengths of two complementary alternatives to the modern starting point. Second, to make teachable (docilis), it delineates the principal vectors of phenomenological engagement, including philosophy of nature, philosophical anthropology, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophical theology, and revealed theology. Third, to arouse attention (attentus), it focuses on the theme of manifestation to highlight the challenge of bringing the two traditions together. In this way, the prooemium encourages the further development of Phenomenological Thomism as a research program involving countless scholars and an infinity of tasks.

Giorgio Agamben’s references to a ‘coming community’ keep readers hunting for its characteristics, specifically for prescriptions that would signal how its political culture might be developed and maintained. His ambivalence toward Augustine prevents him, as well as readers, from discovering contributions the prelate’s preferences for compassionate collectives – which especially mark his polemical treatises, correspondence, and sermons – might make to giving a shape to the coming community that comports with many of Agamben’s other politically significant remarks.

The debate concerning whether Aquinas changed his view on the perfection of the separated soul’s natural cognition, i.e., the cognition not elevated by God’s supernatural grace, remains to be settled. Anton Pegis has argued that according to Aquinas’s earlier view, a separated soul ‘will function perfectly as a separate substance’. However, according to Aquinas’s mature view, it ‘does not have the intellectual power to function properly as a separate substance’, so Aquinas changed his view. In contrast, John Wippel has denied that Pegis showed any radical change in Aquinas’s works on this issue. In this paper, I intend to advance this debate by arguing that, in his Commentary on Sentences IV (1252–56) d. 49, q. 1, a. 4, qc1, Aquinas expounded a view on the perfection of the separated soul’s natural cognition that is incompatible with his view in Summa Theologiae I (1265–68), q. 89, a. 1, co. I will also identify two markedly different views on the implication of the human soul-body union for the perfection of the separated soul’s cognition in these two texts. I contend that the incompatibility between the views in these two texts suggests that Aquinas changed his view.