The reason why all of our students should be Thomists is that excellence among the intellectual virtues is what should come to define our aspirations for them as emerging Christian scholars. Such aspirations are formed by the design and implementation of practices of study. Such aspirations denounce any distinction between subject and object or finite and infinite. However, such aspirations are also guided by the narrative of excellence as defined by the beatific vision of God. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that this narrative is not one the academy generates on its own but is the story of Christianity as embodied by the Church. Failure to recognize such a narrative and design practices of study accordingly not only leaves our students beyond the formative influence of the intellectual virtues but also leaves them susceptible to the influences wielded by other narratives such as the narrative of the market economy.

This article develops the fruitful metaphor of musical performance to think about church-dividing conflicts over doctrine. In particular, I show that just as there is more than one way for a score of music to be faithfully performed, so there can be more than one way for shared fundamental dogma to be faithfully articulated in different confessional or doctrinal traditions. When the disagreements between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches over christological doctrine are reframed as contrasting but not contradictory “performances” of one shared scriptural and Nicene dogma, possibilities for ecumenical reconciliation are strenghthened. Indeed, while not articulating its practice by means of the metaphor of a musical performance, the Roman Catholic magisterium is already approaching doctrinal reconciliation in just this way.

In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.

Anselm's ontological proof, which sets out to show that God must exist and which depends upon the premise that human beings can conceptualize God, seems antithetical to the apophatic tradition, but Anselm's work in general and his proof in particular are, nonetheless, exemplars of apophasis. The proof shows the atheist's position to be untenable, while also revealing the ambiguities of the believer's claim. In proving the necessary existence of God, Anselm destroys all idols and with them, all human conceptions of divinity, for whatever conception can be achieved always stands vulnerable to being overcome. Thus, Anselm is left to conclude that God is in fact “something greater than can be thought.” Anselm shows that language can never offer a final and complete formulation for God, and he does so through his own name for God (“something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought”), a name that remains brilliantly open and which is ingenious, not for what it affirms about God, but rather for what it denies.

Informed study of Aquinas suggests that absolute idealism and realism do not differ about the relation of created and uncreated freedom (praemotio physica) but rather, if at all, about created vis à vis uncreated being generally. Both cannot be in the same sense. Nor, therefore, have we grounds for distinguishing divine or infinite thinking from real production, if nothing else really is. The Thomist doctrine that God has no real relation to anything outside God is thus, implicitly, absolute idealism. Positing “ontological discontinuity” denies the absolutely infinite transcendence in affirming it. We have no being as God, uniquely, has. This is the meaning of “image”, while “face to face” is ultimately one face (intimior me mihi). Seeing and being are one. Thus Hegel should be seen as rather explicating than reducing creation, thus deepening the doctrine and not offering an alternative. R. Gildas merely assumes the latter. Infinity requires union with “alterity”within God and intra-Trinitarian and ad extra processes are thus analogous. So self-renouncement as explaining either creation (originating an origin) or incarnation (kenosis) is anthropomorphic paradox. God has to be “all in all”.

We believe that the God who spoke the universe into existence actually became a human being and dwelt among us. Furthermore, he left us a rich text full of his teachings. Sadly, however, the Jesuit revelation is easily negated by a fundamentalist theory about how to read the biblical text. This paper argues that the whole of Scripture must be read from the perspective of the Gospel lest we make the Jesus revelation into merely one prophetic revelation among many.

Cardinal Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) considered Buddhism to be, after Christianity, the greatest spiritual fact of history. His groundbreaking studies of it have nevertheless received little previous scholarly attention. De Lubac focuses on Amidism, also known as Pure Land Buddhism, because he regards this as the form of Buddhism possessing greatest affinity with Christian faith, particularly in its conceptions of charity and divine personality. Religion cannot be considered in isolation from culture, however. De Lubac argues that Christian-Buddhist encounter is, wherever it occurs, necessarily also an encounter between Western culture and Buddhism, in the course of which boundaries between religions and cultures are continually defined, dissolved and redefined, especially in the understanding of human personhood. He nevertheless defends the universality of faith in Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom the desire of nature for God characteristic of the whole of humanity is fully expressed and realized.

Why should Catholics enter into dialogue with representatives of non-Christian religious traditions? Although the last decades have witnessed an impressive involvement of Catholic theologians in these contacts, a positive dogmatic framework of interreligious dialogue is still waiting in the wings. On one hand, one can no longer be satisfied with trying to make non-Christians realize that Christianity is their beliefs ultimate truth (what about a dialogue with non-Christians then?). On the other hand, one cannot admit of expecting to get some additional knowledge about God that would not already be contained in Tradition and Scriptures, believed to convey the fullness of Gods Revelation to mankind. Putting forward the Traditions legitimate development, the present paper argues that new insights into the fullness of Gods Revelation can be gained from types of religious thinking born beyond the historical limits of Gods Revelation. According to its essence, this Revelation appeals to the contribution of those who have never heard of it.