Top Gun: Maverick is a film about the American Empire: its ethos and hopes, its illusions and contradictions. This essay considers the propaganda content of the movie, and reflects on what it reveals and conceals about the wider political and social context of America's imperial project. The film provides insights on the shifting expectations, and troubles facing the American Empire in 2022. In reflecting upon the sequel and comparing it with the original, it is possible to notice changes and new prerogatives in the self-perception of the United States, as well as an overall imperial fatigue and tension. In particular, this essay evaluates the use of missionary language and metaphors in the film, and considers that empires have a chronic incapacity, or maybe impossibility, in abdicating their power. Top Gun: Maverick shows that an empire, any empire, would simply cease to be such if it would not believe in its own myth of perennial youth. Ultimately, this essay considers the burden of the American Empire: its damnation is its immortality, its illusion of eternity.

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.

Reformed Scholastic John Owen's appropriation and adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’ development of the classical ‘disposition’ (Latin: habitus) concept offers practical insight into seventeenth century faculty psychology. This article argues that Owen not only borrows deliberately from Aquinas, he also attempts to simplify and even improve upon Aquinas’ more complicated theological, philosophical, and psychological insights in this important area. While he deals with dispositions of the mind, will, and affections in a way that is broadly similar to Aquinas’ ontological understanding, Owen's most significant contribution to seventeenth century faculty psychology and its theological use is a sustained and consistent emphasis on the necessity of virtuous affections in the pursuit of communion with God. Examining this concept also provides greater context for how the Reformed Scholastics were able to interact with their medieval counterparts. In this we see the Reformed Scholastics’ continuity with the Christian tradition and their depth of understanding regarding human nature.

In this essay, I argue that Thomas Aquinas's and Herbert McCabe's soteriological paradigms are immensely compatible with one another. In contrast to the presuppositions held by certain interpreters of Thomas, I contend that Aquinas, like McCabe, rejects a primarily juridical/transactional understanding of Christ's Passion, and, in light of this fact, it is a mistake to assert that his soteriology is a precursor to later penal-substitutionary conceptions of the atonement. Once Aquinas's and McCabe's teachings are correctly situated within a relational/friendship rather than juridical context, their similarities and mutual aversion to penal-substitutionary atonement becomes explicit. Likewise, after appropriately identifying McCabe's indebtedness to Aquinas's thought, one can perceive his unique and substantial contribution to the Church's understanding of Christ's salvific work. The comparison between Aquinas and McCabe, in particular, provides clarity to a proper conception of the intrinsic disordering of sin and the essential character of Christ's meritorious love and obedience offered to God the Father.

In the tradition of both Cicero and Hume, this paper explores the nature of God in dialogic form. Set at the tomb of Thomas Aquinas, in a church that is now a museum, the dialogue focuses on the central question of divine hiddenness, offering a novel alternative to both the atheistic interpretation of hiddenness in terms of divine amoral aloofness and the theistic account of hiddenness in terms of human indolence. Phenomenologically speaking, God the creator, in order to be God the creator, must be hidden to creatures. Divine hiddenness is, therefore, natural and does not necessarily call into question the moral status of God or of humans.