The English Dominican friar Cornelius Ernst OP left an enduring mark on the intellectual life of the English province. Although some of his lectures and articles were published in the volume Multiple Echo, there are a number of different avenues of Cornelius’ work that remain as seeds. Building on Cornelius’ paper ‘A Preface to Theology’, this article investigates the relationship between Cornelius and Edward Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt. Although Evans-Pritchard is most frequently cited in Cornelius’ works, I argue that it is to Godfrey Lienhardt that we should look for the anthropological roots of Cornelius’ ontology of meaning. This paper also interrogates the question of whether there is such a thing as ‘Oxford anthropology’, and whether this has a particular Catholic character. Although I argue that there is no sign of a Catholic anthropology in Oxford, we have to be able to give some account of an anthropologically engaged Catholic theology in the work of Cornelius Ernst. Building on the idea of Cornelius’ work offering seeds for future development, I conclude with a short exploration of how anthropology could act as a preface to theology today, especially in bolstering fundamental theology.

William Inge, Edward Gordon Selwyn, and Charles Gore represent three Anglican responses to John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine. Development sought to account for doctrinal changes in Christianity by characterising Christianity as a ‘real idea’, expressing an object in the mind that can only be shown in its fullness by encounters with different philosophies over time. This was part of a wider intellectual movement in the 19th century away from static ideas of doctrinal history and towards more dynamic and subjective treatments. Inge, Selwyn, and Gore all make use of Newman after the First World War. Inge argues Newman abstracts historical facts from their realities, and abandons the old concept of tradition, where the church is the custodian of revelation, in favour of a relativistic concept, new in each generation. Selwyn makes use of Newman’s idea to argue for the autonomy of religious experience as a source of human knowledge mediated through religious traditions. Gore argues Newman enables ‘mobility’ in communicating Christianity to different cultures but argues development can be used justify distortions of the first revelation. The test of their authenticity should be whether they are inclusive of those Christ would be inclusive.

In his 2019 essay, Arthur Kleinman laments that medicine has become ever-competent at managing illness, yet caring for those who are ill is increasingly out of practice. He opines that the language of ‘the soul’ is helpful to those practicing medicine, as it provides an important counterbalance to medicine’s technical rationality that avoids the existential and spiritual domains of human life. His accusation that medicine has become soulless merits considering, yet we believe his is the wrong description of contemporary medicine. Where medicine is disciplined by technological and informational rationalities that risk coercing attention away from corporealities and toward an impersonal, digital order, the resulting practices expose medicine to becoming not soulless but excarnated. Here we engage Kleinman in conversation with Franco Berardi, Charles Taylor, and others to ask: Have we left behind the body for senseless purposes? Perhaps medicine is not proving itself to be soulless, but rather senseless, bodyless – the any-occupation of excarnated souls. If so, the dissension of excarnation and the recovery of touching purpose seems to us to be an apparent need within the contemporary and increasingly digitally managed and informationally ordered medical milieu.

The explosive increase in life expectancy over the 20th century led to the formulation of multiple gerontological theories. Of these, it is the evolutionary theories of senescence that enjoy the greatest theoretical and empirical support today. It is striking that these models put reproduction at the center of their postulates, an emphasis shared with the Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrines of the living being; this meeting point inspires our model. In particular, we hypothesize that the corporeal living being, precisely because of its mortality, can only fulfill the universal vocation to similitudo Dei through the generation of another living being of the same species. Once this purpose is fulfilled, its biological organization – understood here as a minimal entitative disposition that allows the actualization of matter by substantial form – decays and is exposed to random damage, as predicted by evolutionary models. This gradual decline is what is known as senescence. Such an approach opens up the possibility of addressing aging positively, with an emphasis on organizational prolongation resulting in a healthier old age. At the same time, such a perspective could illuminate our current understanding of biological organization and the pathologies that affect it.

Published discussions of academic plagiarism in theology are uncommon but nevertheless necessary. This article defends the importance of post-publication peer review of prior scholarship in theology as an essential practice for maintaining the reliability of the body of published research literature. Open conversations about violations of research and publication ethics support a culture of scholarly integrity. Two articles published by one prolific 20th-century researcher provide distinctive and instructive case studies. Those two continue to be cited as original contributions to scholarship, even though they consist of sentences and paragraphs copied without clear attribution from a variety of earlier authors. Without post-publication peer review, yesterday’s plagiarism will affect the scholarship of tomorrow.

Brian Leftow’s observation that the logical problem of evil is largely resolved, mainly due to the success of free-will defenses, is not universally accepted.1 Graham Oppy, for instance, acknowledges the current shortcomings in formulating a logical argument from evil but contends that deeming such efforts futile is premature.2 Likewise, James Sterba’s recent work shows continued attempts to develop this argument.3 These views prompt a critical question: Is constructing a successful logical argument from evil futile, or will persistence yield success as it has in other philosophical inquiries?

This article introduces the ‘Layers of Reality Response’ to the logical problem of evil, aiming to conclusively resolve the debate for classical theists, independent of free-will defenses. This response establishes two points:

1. 1. Common linking principles in logical arguments from evil are not evidently true and fail to apply across different layers of reality.

2. 2. There is no non-question-begging linking principle for proponents of the logical argument from evil, making a successful formulation inherently unachievable.

If correct, this renders the logical argument from evil not just a philosophical failure but an argument that cannot, in principle, be successfully reformulated – it is not only dead but ‘unresurrectable’.

This article investigates how two eminent scholars, the French cultural historian Rémi Brague and the American professor of Government J.Budziszewski misunderstand Aquinas on law. It explores the possible reasons for their misunderstandings. In both cases there is a failure to appreciate the theological context and content of what St Thomas has to say about law. Their lack of appreciation for the theological content explains also their individual specific distortions of the account of law. Brague confuses eternal law and divine law, which Aquinas explicitly distinguishes, and applies an abstract notion of the divine which heapplies not only to medieval Christian texts, but also to Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and Islamic ideas on law. Budziszewski imposes on St Thomas’s classification of types of law the logical structure of genus and species, despite acknowledging that Aquinas avoids this language. The result is that he fails to appreciate the significance of eternal law. Both scholars misapprehend eternal law, and this is due to their ignoring theology. They exemplify a characteristic mistake of treating St Thomas as a philosopher, and his theology as something added on to the philosophical account.