PAST CONFERENCES

Aquinas as Spiritual Teacher

St. Thomas Aquinas preaches in his sermon Puer Jesus "Just as your father begot you bodily, your teacher begets you spiritually." St. Thomas himself has been blessed with prodigious fecundity through the centuries for his teaching in the Holy Spirit. Always, he leads us to think of the Blessed Trinity and all things from God's own view.

With new insights into St. Thomas's spiritual teaching in its sources, context, breadth, wisdom, and influences, Thomas Aquinas as Spiritual Teacher presents chapters inspired by an international conference co-sponsored by the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Dominican House of Studies. The volume, like its conference, honors Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his dedication to the spiritual teaching of St. Thomas in several decades of service to the Church and the academy. Luis F. Cardinal Ladaria, SJ, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, contributed the volume's foreword.

Hope and Death: Christian Responses

Paul famously challenges his readers in 1 Corinthians, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.” What does it mean to hope in Christ for the life to come? How can we intellectually defend such hope in the midst of secularist and materialist trends so prevalent in contemporary society? Even if we believe as Christians in eternal life, how do we find meaning in such hope when the injustices of the world and our own suffering often loom so large?

Drawing primarily upon the witness of biblical revelation and its reception and formulation in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, the essays in Hope & Death: Christian Responses answer contemporary questions related to how Christians might face suffering and death with hopeful minds and hearts. The essays recover Christian hope in three main parts: what hope reveals about God’s nature and his providence, how hope responds to and clarifies the meaning of human suffering, and the way in which all hope draws human beings to an end beyond this world.

Thomas Aquinas and the Crisis of Christology

"But who do you say that I am?" asks Jesus at the decisive turning point in the Gospel. Simon Peter answers correctly at first but is soon corrected when he protests the revelation of the Cross. Christians in every age are called to confess the right faith in Jesus, who suffered, died, and rose for our salvation. Our own period is beset by a crisis of faith in Jesus, which has had manifold deleterious effects on our lives, our Christian communities, and our world.

For the sake of addressing this crisis, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty at the Dominican House of Studies cosponsored an international conference that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Crisis of Christology. Beginning with a gripping foreword by Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this volume gathers together several of the excellent conference presentations given by scholars working in North America, South America, Europe, and Western Asia. These studies consider both formulations of who Christ is and of how we are under his judgement. With help from Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition, this work engages today's crisis of Christology as seen in multiple theological topics and offers models of faith to answer Jesus' question for ourselves, "But who do you say that I am?"

Thomas Aquinas, Biblical Theologian

In the past eight hundred years, it is possible that no other theologian has shaped our understanding of God, man, and the Church more than St. Thomas Aquinas. While many people are familiar with his most famous work, the Summa Theologiae, fewer know of his important role as a biblical theologian. But in fact, Aquinas’ primary work was biblical theology. His biblical commentaries remain invaluable in the ongoing work of Scripture study.

The essays in Thomas Aquinas, Biblical Theologian explore some of Aquinas’ most important contributions within his biblical commentaries and the ongoing work of Scripture study. A dozen contributors explore Aquinas’ thought on faith and revelation, the study of the Sacred Page, and other dogmatic and moral considerations.

Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers

Scholars have often been quick to acknowledge Thomas Aquinas’s distinctive retrieval of Aristotle’s Greek philosophical heritage. Often lagging, however, has been a proper appreciation of both his originality and indebtedness in appropriating the great theological insights of the Greek Fathers of the Church. In a similar way to his integration of the Aristotelian philosophical corpus, Aquinas successfully interwove the often newly received and translated Greek patristic sources into a thirteenth-century theological framework, one dominated by the Latin Fathers. His use of the Greek Fathers definitively shaped his exposition of sacra doctrina in the fundamental areas of God and creation, Trinitarian theology, the moral life, and Christ and the Sacraments.

For the sake of filling this lacuna and of piquing scholarly interest in Aquinas’s relation to the Fathers of the Christian East, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies co-sponsored an international gathering of scholars that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Sensitive to the commonalities and the differences between Aquinas and the Greek Fathers, the essays in this volume have sprung from the theme of this conference and offer a harvest of some of the conference’s fruits. At long last, scholars have a rich volume of diverse, penetrating essays that both underscore Aquinas’s unique standing among the Latin scholastics in relationship to the Greek Fathers and point the way toward avenues of further study.