In this paper I will investigate a recent development on St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of dual causality and see if it truly develops Aquinas’ thinking or departs from it. Denis Edwards made significant contributions to contemporary Catholic theology especially as it concerns the relationship between science and Christian theology. In one very interesting publication, ‘Toward a Theology of Divine Action’, Edwards employs the developments of William R Stoeger, a Jesuit theologian who has also contributed a great deal to Catholic thought on science, to reconcile Stoeger's work with the Thomist tradition. Edwards argued that Stoeger's account of the laws of nature creates a space for the development which is built on Aquinas’ account of divine causality and miracles. However, I hope to show that Edwards’ account of divine causality does not actually offer anything new and opposes key features of Thomist thought. This paper will investigate Edward's understanding of the Thomist position and the consequences of departing from it.

While the story of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio engaging in a friendly contest, at the behest of Pope Urban IV, to compose the Mass and Office of Corpus Christi is likely a pious fiction, one can still ponder the fascinating hypothetical scenario: had such a contest taken place, who might have won? To consider that question, this paper embarks on a close reading of Bonaventure's hymns in his Office of the Passion, comparing his poetic approaches to those of Aquinas in the hymns for Corpus Christi. After an introductory historical examination into the supposed involvement of both friars in the composition of the Corpus Christi liturgy, this article proceeds in three sections. First, a look into select excerpts from Bonaventure's Office of the Passion will establish his general poetic technique. In the transitional second section, a direct comparison between Bonaventure and Aquinas on the composition of the final doxological verses of their respective hymns will place their different poetic styles into greater relief. Third, a broader reading of Aquinas's Eucharistic hymns will highlight the unique qualities of his versified praises. Finally, in light of the foregoing analyses, a prospective winner of the hypothetical contest will be suggested.

A synodal church makes assumptions about our basic ecclesial experience which takes place when we assemble liturgically, especially when we act eucharistically. The basic assumption is that we are a genuine human community knowing and relating to one another as brothers and sisters in baptism. Only real communities can authentically image the church's nature. This is a ‘bottom – up’ activity. If we wish this, then we must rediscover our liturgy and celebrate it in a new way as flowing out from a community and helping it to discover its own nature. This, in turn, makes demands on our understanding of ministry and its structures. While many Catholics endorse synodality, their willingness to change the shape of the presbyterate is uncertain.

A common argument put forth by naturalists (including the prominent philosopher Graham Oppy) in support of naturalism as a worldview over theism, is to claim that naturalism is a simpler hypothesis. Theism posits the existence of everything that naturalism does, plus the existence of a theistic realm. Thus, all things being equal, via Ockham's Razor, naturalism should be preferred to theism. In this essay, we argue that the Classical Theist need not worry about the naturalist's Simplicity argument. Specifically, we argue that, the one holding to a scholastic metaphysics (i.e., potency-act distinction, participatory metaphysics, and existence-in-degree), in the end, will be the one with the simpler worldview.

Thomas Aquinas's vision of atonement is generally considered more conceptually expansive than Anselm of Canterbury's. Where Aquinas's multipartite account of Christ's passion incorporates a variety of biblical motifs, Anselm appears to narrow the focus to satisfactory debt-repayment alone. This article proposes two approaches for reframing the comparison between the two accounts. I argue first that both Anselm and Aquinas considered debt-repayment necessary but not sufficient in itself to accomplish all that is needed for the remittance of sin and the restoration of humanity. For Anselm, as for Aquinas, Christ must also liberate captives, defeat the devil, amend Adam's sin by recapitulation and win merit in which his members participate. The first reframing thus locates Anselm in much closer proximity to Aquinas than has generally been supposed. The second reframing throws light on a significant divergence between the two. I argue that the kenotic trajectory of abasement and ascent, pictured in the Philippian hymn, is put to strikingly different use by each theologian. This second reframing throws into sharp relief Aquinas's emphasis on Christ's suffering as a theological priority which Anselm does not share. Looking to Anselm's Benedictine context, I contend, yields one possible means of accounting for this departure.

This contribution discusses the expression ‘Image of the Father’ as a case in point to Aquinas's approach of naming Christ: Christology and Trinitarian theology, as well as the discussion of analogical naming in divinis, need to be taken together. ‘Image’ and ‘Father’ are predicated differently of Christ and God the Father than of human beings. Moreover, God is ‘Father’ in a different way towards the Son than regarding human beings. Christ is the unique image of the Father: the invisible image of the invisible Father.

In this paper I will discuss one of the soteriological models Thomas Aquinas outlines in his Summa Theologiae, namely ‘sacrifice’. This is only one of several, but not mutually exclusive, ways in which Thomas interprets our salvation in Christ. I will briefly list the other models before focussing in more depth on sacrifice by considering some objections against it. I will continue by outlining Thomas's theology of sacrifice in its own right and explain its connections with the Eucharist. By way of conclusion I will return to the modern criticism raised.

There is an ancient Christian tradition of a ‘good and holy death’. That tradition has largely been forgotten in the medicalization of death, which regards death solely as an enemy to be defeated at all costs. This paper examines the tradition of a holy death through the lens of Margaret Edson's play W;t, with particular attention paid to the use of John Donne's poetry in the play. The paper then uses theologian Allen Verhey's writings on the Christian art of dying as a means to understand the play in a Christian context, with special attention paid to the way in which it portrays Vivian Bearing, the play's protagonist, as a victim as much as a beneficiary of modern medicine.

This paper advances a provisional case denying the attribution of the medieval liturgical sequence Sanctitatis nova signa, written in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, to Thomas of Celano (died c. 1260), who is best known for writing the earliest biography of the saint. The Conventual Franciscan friar and bishop, Pietro Ridolfi, provides the oldest extant attribution of this sequence to Celano. Luke Wadding (died 1657) echoes this point in his Annales Minorum; several recent critical editions of early Franciscan texts, as well as countless secondary sources, cite Wadding for the attribution to Celano. This identification remains problematic, not only due to the lateness of the Ridolfi-Wadding claim; the sequence's use of Dionysian mystical motifs and details unique to Bonaventure's Legenda Major (completed 1262) should exclude the possibility of Celano's authorship. Consequently this study tentatively dates the sequence to the latter part of the thirteenth century. Unlike the earlier sequences for Saint Francis attributed to Pope Gregory IX (died 1241) and Thomas of Capua (died 1243), Sanctitatis depicts Francis as a model Dionysian mystic. This mystical exemplarity becomes the image of unity advanced by the Franciscans to heal the internal crises plaguing the order in the later thirteenth century.

The ‘naturalizing’ agenda in contemporary secularist philosophy is often presented in opposition to traditional theism. But looking at the history of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ reveals a discontinuity between how these terms are currently understood and how they were understood in the past. The modern ‘naturalist’, in insisting that all phenomena should be brought within the domain of the natural, is advancing a thesis that many classical, medieval and early-modern philosophers and theologians would have regarded as fairly self-evident. What has changed is not that there is a new determination to include within the natural domain what was previously excluded from it, but rather that there is a radical shift in how the natural domain is to be understood. This paper argues that the philosophically interesting question is not whether or not we should be naturalists, but which of two naturalisms we should adopt: secular naturalism, with its neutralist conception of nature in general and of human nature in particular, or theistic naturalism, according to which the natural world and our own nature bear the stamp of the divine. It turns out the former (secularist) view is vulnerable to serious difficulties, on both the epistemic and the moral fronts.