Catholic Thought Research Articles

The Land of Realism and the Shipwreck of Idea-ism: Thomas Aquinas and Milton Friedman on the Social Responsibilities of Business

The views of thirteenth century Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas and twentieth century economist Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business are contrasted by probing the foundations of their positions. The basis of Aquinas’ normative stance in political economy is found in the metaphysical and moral realism of the classic tradition. The role Descartes and Hobbes played in overturning this philosophical starting point and ushering in an age of ideology is traced out. Friedman’s commitment to Comte’s vision of positivism is revealed and what this entails for metaphysics, ethics, and economics is given.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-Sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions

CrossCurrentsVolume 58, Issue 1 p. 65-94 The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-Sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions Stephen Schloesser, Stephen SchloesserSearch for more papers by this author Stephen Schloesser, Stephen SchloesserSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 July 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-3881.2008.00005.x This paper was delivered on October 31, 2007, as the first in a series of lectures on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA. I completed the research and writing at the University of San Francisco while occupying the LoSchiavo Chair in Catholic Thought at the Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought. I am grateful for USF’s generous financial assistance that made this work possible. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume58, Issue1Spring 2008Pages 65-94 RelatedInformation

Intellectual Property and the Preferential Option for the Poor

This article, written for a symposium on the meaning of the Catholic doctrine of the preferential option for the poor, examines that concept as applied to problems of intellectual property. IP lies at the heart of debates over globalization and whether it is working to help poor nations or to impose new costs on them while increasing the wealthy nations' relative advantages. The Catholic Church has weighed in on these issues, most clearly in favor of limiting patent rights over essential medicines for combating AIDS and other epidemics. The Catholic doctrine of the preferential option for the poor puts the condition of the poor at the forefront of public-policy concerns, subjecting private property rights to a social mortgage for the satisfaction of essential human needs. But this and related doctrines also set forth themes for how the poor are to helped: the importance of empowering people to exercise their own creativity and productivity, and the value of subsidiary organizations as contrasted with the bureaucracy involved in state solutions. Thus Catholic thinkers debate in general whether limits on property rights help the poor in the fullest sense. This article argues that recent Catholic statements endorsing limits on IP rights are well founded: that whatever position one takes generally on property rights and the poor, the principles of the preferential option point toward a skepticism about broad IP rights. Intellectual property, like other forms of property, serves important purposes related to human dignity, productivity, and (especially) creativity, and Catholic teaching therefore affirms it. But for a variety of reasons, limits on intellectual property are equally important: the full extension of IP rights may harm the poor, and certain limits on those rights are important to benefiting and empowering the poor. In particular, certain existing or proposed limits on IP rights can resonate with Catholic concepts such as maintenance of the common good and the importance of subsidiary organizations defined neither by the state nor by the market. And expressions of skepticism in Catholic thought about bureaucratic approaches to the poor reflected in the social assistance state have relatively little application to the kind of limits on IP rights that may be adopted to empower the poor.

Review Essay: The Shaping of Catholic Thought and Action in the United States

Review Essay: The Shaping of Catholic Thought and Action in the United States

Religión y sociedad en España (siglos XIX y XX) (review)

Reviewed by: Religión y sociedad en España (siglos XIX y XX) William J. Callahan Religión y sociedad en España (siglos XIX y XX). Edited by Paul Aubert. [Collección de la Casa de Velázquez, Volume 77.] (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. 2002. Pp. xiv, 292. €45 paperback.) The essays contained in this volume were first presented at a seminar held at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid during 1994 and 1995. The contributors are for the most part well-known Spanish and French scholars who have published extensively on the role of religion and the Church in modern Spain, including Paul Aubert, Gérard Dufour, José Manuel Cuenca Toribio, Manuel Revuelta González, and Manuel Suárez Cortina The book's focus is not on the social history of Catholicism and the Church. It does not consider questions such as popular religions, clerical demography, or the resurgent organizational activities of the Church from the late nineteenth century onward. It concentrates on the broader question of the place of religion and the Church within a society affected by the political changes introduced by liberalism, the emergence of new secularizing intellectual currents, and the social tensions introduced by capitalist economic development. Three themes predominate. Four essays concentrate on relations between Church and state from the concordat of 1753, a triumph for the strongly regalist government of the day, through the transition to democracy following the death of Franco in 1975. Taken as a whole, these essays provide a compact and well-documented survey of what was a complex and ongoing attempt to define the precise place of the Church within a state that was officially Catholic until the 1931 constitution of the Second Republic separated church and state for the first time in the nation's history. A set of three essays discusses the second theme, the ideological struggle waged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over the place of religion and, by extension, of the Church within society. In the work of figures such as Donoso Cortés and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, a new and more sophisticated Catholic conservative ideology emerged to replace, at least in [End Page 425] part, an older tradition based on the historic identification of Throne and Altar under absolute monarchy. The new direction taken by conservative Catholic thinkers did not go unanswered as intellectuals moved by a commitment to rationalism and progress saw religion and the Church as an obstacle to the realization of this grand design. Between these opposing views a debate began that would persist well into the twentieth century. A third set of essays considers the development of anticlericalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors note the complex and sometimes contradictory sources of modern anticlericalism in Spain. They argue persuasively that the primarily political anticlericalism of nineteenth-century liberal governments and occasional outbursts of violent popular anticlericalism, primarily between 1834 and 1843, moved in new directions after 1898 and became an essential part of reforming projects advanced by politicians, intellectuals, social reformers, and revolutionaries. Anticlericalism and the corresponding reaction to it of the Church and its supporters became central to debate over the nation's future and finally emerged in passionate discussion and violence following the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. The essays in this volume set a high standard. They provide an intelligent and well-argued survey of some of the key questions involving the place of the Church within modern Spain. William J. Callahan University of Toronto (Emeritus) Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

The status of Hebrew in Friedrich Schlegel's Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier

ABSTRACTThe paper asks why Friedrich Schlegel classified Hebrew and Arabic as ‘mechanical’, i.e. non inflectional, languages in his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier rather than include them among the ‘organic’ languages of divine origin. The classification is puzzling because of the inflectional structure of Semitic languages and because a Catholic thinker would be more likely to argue for the divine origin of Hebrew. The paper argues that, contrary to the suggestions of several scholars, Schlegel's classification of Hebrew and Arabic did not result from anti‐Semitic motives. Schlegel relied on Johann David Michaelis's theory that case endings in Arabic were artificial. Schlegel concluded from this theory that all inflection in Semitic languages was artificial. The exclusion of Hebrew from the ‘organic’ languages served two important ideological purposes: 1) It supported the idea that the ancient Hebrews had remained isolated from the general degeneration of Oriental religion and philosophy and kept their monotheism pure: 2) The romantic concept of the organic as an integrated whole meant that ‘organic’ languages had to be a genetic group. Hebrew could not fit into this group, because it was not genetically related to Sanskrit.

The Natural Motion of Matter in Newtonian and Post-Newtonian Physics

The Thomist 71 (2007): 529-54 THE NATURAL MOTION OF MATTER IN NEWTONIAN AND POST-NEWTONIAN PHYSICS ]OHNW. KECK Institute for the Study ofNature Washington, D.C. IN THE CENTURIES since Isaac Newton delivered modern science into an astonished world, the great unanswered question remains: what do its suppositions and abstractions mean in terms of common human experience? The critical problem remains how to incorporate science's valid insights into a well-grounded philosophy of nature. Certainly the rise of modern science has been the most jarring intellectual movement in history. The dislocations sprung from this science originate not only in its technology, but even more in its concepts and discoveries that are ostensibly at odds with traditional natural philosophy. Natural philosophy is the basis of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and ethics, "because it is through the senses that we are open to things, and something enters us, according to our natural mode of knowing. "1 As theology makes use of philosophy, natural philosophy also makes an indirect contribution to theology.2 Modern science and Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy claim the same sensible world as their home territory.3 Science's tremendous successes advertise 1 Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954), 35. 2 Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. E. I. Watkin (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), 87. 3 Benedict M. Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 9091 . 529 530 JOHNW. KECK that it has some real claim to truth about this world, so 1t 1s difficult to blame the world for failing to take seriously a philosophy that, while claiming to be grounded in sense experience, fails to account for the real aspects of nature that modern science has discovered. In the absence of such an accounting, inferior philosophy readily occupies the vacancy. It is incumbent on the perennial philosophy to provide an adequate account of the sensible world-all of it. The task of the present inquiry is to begin to pay part of this centuries-old debt by resolving Newtonian and post-Newtonian physics in terms of traditional natural philosophy. The chasm that separates science from natural philosophy runs between their understandings of nature. At the beginning of book 2 of the Physics, Aristotle defines nature as "a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily."4 Nature is an inherent source of motion and rest. In his discussion of chance, Aristotle emphasizes the purposefulness of nature's acts: "action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature."5 In stark contrast, modern physics6 restricts itself to the mathematical principles of nature. Since quantity is most closely related to matter, which is inactive and undetermined insofar as it is material, modern physics is blind to purpose, as well as to closely related substantial form.7 It is instructive to examine how modern physics treats Aristotle's four kinds of causal explanation. Nature, as Aristotle wrote, includes four causes and "it is the business of the physicist to know about them all."8 Modern physics, by reducing all of nature to the quantifiable and measurable, has effectively 4 Aristotle, Physics 2.1.192b21-22 (trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, ed. Mortimer]. Adler, in GreatBooks ofthe Western World 8 [Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952], 257-355; this translation is used throughout this article). 5 Ibid., 2.8.199a6-7. 6 Modern physics here means (modern) mathematical natural philosophy, not quantum mechanics. 7 David L. Schindler, "Introduction: The Problem of Mechanism," in David L. Schindler, ed., Beyond Mechanism: The Universe in RecentPhysics and Catholic Thought (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986), 4. 8 Aristotle, Physics 2.7.198a23. THE NATURAL MOTION OF MATTER 531 eliminated all but one of the four causes. Matter exists not as analogical potency, but (since quantity is the only recognized accident) univocally as the ultimate actuality beneath all things.9 Formal causality persists but accidentally through mathematics (e.g., the form of "roundness" makes a ball round). Substantial form is...

El asedio a la <i>cristiandad</i>. Intelectuales católicos y sociedad (1950-1965)

From the decline of Pius XII’s papacy to the end of the Vatican Council II, Catholicism faced an actual internal revolution. This paper seeks to analyse the development of discourse in Argentinian catholic thinkers in the 1950s and 1960s; and the conditions under which this change has been possible. The conciliary period was capable of transforming the inner relational system in catholicism and modifying the ways of sanction and legitimacy of discourse in the field: what can and what cannot be said underwent a radical transformation. Issues such as the role of laymen, pluralism, ecumenical dialogue, the relationship Church-State, etc., set up the coordinates of this intense debate.

Natural Law and Natural Inclinations: Rhonheimer, Pinckaers, McAleer

The Thomist 70 (2006): 155-201 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS: RHONHEIMER, PINCKAERS, McALEER MATTHEW LEVERING Ave Maria University Naples, Florida THE QUESTION OF THE STATUS of natural inclinations looms large in any Thomistic account of the natural law. Aquinas's presentation of the content of the natural law depends significantly upon his understanding of natural inclinations. Inclination, he observes, arises out of the convertibility of being and good. As he states, "Now as being is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply, so good is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good."1 Whether the practical reason discerns or constitutes the natural law hinges, first and foremost, on the nature of this dynamism toward the good that belongs to the created teleology of the never-neutral creature. Aquinas defines this dynamism toward the good as "the first principle in the practical reason," from which follows "the first precept of law, that good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided."2 He unfolds this natural inclination toward the good by specifying four further natural inclinations, arranged in an ontological hierarchy, each of which expresses an aspect of the natural inclination toward the human good. These hierarchically ordered natural inclinations are the teleologies inscribed by 1 STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2. 2 Ibid. 155 156 MATTHEW LEVERING creation in human nature. They compass the vegetative, animal, and spiritual components of the one human soul. The precepts of the natural law, that is to say, what reason "naturally apprehends as man's good,"3 are all based in this created teleological structure of natural inclinations toward ends. As Aquinas puts it, good has the nature of an end, and evil, the nature of a contrary, hence ... all those things to which man has a natural inclination are naturally apprehended by reason as being good, and consequently as objects of pursuit, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance. Wherefore according to the order of natural inclinations is the order of the precepts of the natural law.4 Natural inclinations and reason's apprehension of the precepts of natural law belong to the same teleological ordering of the human being as created. If this is so, certain questions arise. How does the natural law arise in the human person? How do freedom and the natural inclinations relate? How should the rational character of natural law be described? Is natural law discerned by human reason as a normative order inscribed in nature? Or is natural law constituted by the judgments of practical reason, which transform and elevate (humanize) inclinations found in nature by reorienting these inclinations to the personal ends known by spiritual creatures? In pondering these questions, I will survey three recent accounts of natural law and natural inclinations, by Martin Rhonheimer , Servais Pinckaers, and Graham McAleer respectively. Each of these authors treats Aquinas's discussion in some detail. Examination of the three approaches will illumine how differently Catholic thinkers have approached the relationship of natural law and natural inclinations. Rhonheimer emphasizes the independence or freedom of practical reason in constituting the natural law from the data provided by the natural inclinations. He desires to affirm the fully personal and free activity of human beings in working out their own salvation through practical reason and 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 157 moral action. Pinckaers argues that a nominalist understanding of "nature" places nature in conflict with reason and thereby undercuts Aquinas's theology of the natural law. For this reason Pinckaers devotes significant effort to retrieving a positive account of the natural inclinations. Lastly, McAleer begins with the metaphysical and teleological structure of human bodiliness, so as to locate the natural law within an ecstatic framework adequate to the human person's participation in God. With its emphasis on the constitutive role of practical reason, Rhonheimer's approach to natural law and natural inclinations possesses similarities to that of the "new natural law theory" proposed by Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Robert George, and others.5 Pinckaers, for...

The Role of Interreligious Dialogue in Addressing Ideological Support for Terrorism: Roman Catholic Perspectives

The roots of the Roman Catholic Church’s efforts in interreligious dialogue over the past half-century rest in the work of a number of individuals, including that of the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray. Fr. Murray was among several whose views and writings on this question during the first half of the twentieth century were viewed with suspicion in some Roman Catholic circles, as they evidenced too much influence from democratic ideals and principles that were, in some cases, at odds with official Church teaching. Yet, during the Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) held between 1963 and 1965, he and others saw their once suspect opinions incorporated into official Church teaching. This is an excellent example of how culture and belief often interact to bring about something new, something positive—an example of how patient perseverance, coupled with hope, can help bring about change. While major developments in interreligious dialogue have occurred over the past century, this is not to suggest that interactions between Roman Catholicism and nonChristian religions, and especially Islam, can only be traced to this period. It goes without saying that the West is highly indebted to many great Islamic thinkers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina)—to name only two—for their influence on and contributions to the world’s knowledge in such areas as medicine, philosophy, and mathematics. Indeed, the philosophical and theological writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest Roman Catholic thinkers, were deeply influenced by Islamic thought. When it came to an actual conversation or dialogue around specifically theological and religious issues, however, before the Second Vatican Council the dominant view within the Catholic tradition was that, while other religious traditions may have some element of truth to them, they were fundamentally erroneous. Consistent with this position, any notion of interreligious dialogue (not to mention religious freedom) on the part of the Catholic Church was a logical inconstancy. This view helped fuel intense missionary efforts to convert others to the Catholic faith, since all other faiths were thought to be untrue. In fairness, Roman Catholicism was not alone in this view. Although it might be articulated differently in other traditions, its effects are equally discernable. For example, the spread of Christianity, specifically Anglicanism, went hand-

Rome and Theistic Evolutionism: The Hidden Strategies behind the ‘Dorlodot Affair’, 1920–1926

Summary In 1918, Henry de Dorlodot—priest, theologian, and professor of geology at the University of Louvain (Belgium)—published Le Darwinisme au point de vue de l'Orthodoxie Catholique (translated as Darwinism and Catholic Thought) in which he defended a reconciliation between evolutionary theory and Catholicism with his own particular kind of theistic evolutionism. He subsequently announced a second volume in which he would extend his conclusions to the origin of Man. Traditionalist circles in Rome reacted vehemently. Operating through the Pontifical Biblical Commission, they tried to force Dorlodot to withdraw his book and to publicly disown his ideas by threatening him with an official condemnation, a strategy that had been used against Catholic evolutionists since the late nineteenth century. The archival material on the ‘Dorlodot affair’ shows how this policy ‘worked’ in the early stages of the twentieth century but also how it would eventually reach the end of its logic. The growing popularity of theistic evolutionism among Catholic intellectuals, combined with Dorlodot's refusal to pull back amidst threats, made certain that the traditionalists did not get their way completely, and the affair ended in an uncomfortable status quo. Dorlodot did not receive the official condemnation that had been threatened, nor did he withdraw his theories, although he stopped short on publishing on the subject. With the decline of the traditionalists’ power and authority, the policy of denunciation towards evolutionists made way for a growing tolerance. The ‘Dorlodot affair’—which occurred in a pivotal era in the history of the Church—can be seen as exemplary with regards to the changing attitude of the Roman authorities towards evolutionism in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (review)

Mexican The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. By Osvaldo F. Pardo. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 250; 26 plates. $70.00.) This book represents a significant new treatment of the Spanish Catholic enterprise of religious instruction. Pardo joins several other contemporary scholars in seeing the process as being lengthy rather than swift, uneven, fraught with controversy, and shot through with agency. Even trying to assess the relative success or failure of conversion is, according to the present author, an exercise in reductionsim. Yet the title of this book is somewhat misleading. Sources from the Nahua side, such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, are given employed to some extent, but the friars and the works they authored (or at least heavily influenced) receive the lion's share of analytical attention. Beyond the title, Pardo (who specializes in the study of colonial literature and culture) actually makes no bones about this orientation. He seeks to understand how members of the mendicant clergy in sixteenth-century Mexico-primarily the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians-came to understand and interpret rituals, sacred ideology, and character, and how their interpretations colored the ways in which they presented the new Faith. He has chosen to emphasize four sacraments-Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, and the Eucharist- because they constitute what can be loosely called a model of Christian initiation . (p. 15). The author draws heavily from the thoughts and writings of Motolinia, Mendieta, Dura, the 1548 Dominican Doctrina, detailed reports from parish clergy collected in the Descripcion del Arzobispado de Mexico (1569), Fray Alonso de Molina's Confessionario Mayor en la lengua mexicana y castittana, Fray Juan Bautista's influential Nahuatl-language Advertencias para los confessores de los naturales (1600), and several other significant texts. It may be true, as the author asserts, that potentially enlightening early-postconquest Nahua-authored texts are almost nonexistent, but Pardo seems to miss the potential of the large numbers of alphabetic Nahuatl sources, not to mention pictorial codices, mural art, architectural decoration, and the like, dating from the more mature decades of the first colonial century. The author also overlooks the role of the aides in the creation of many of the Nahuatl-language instructional texts used here that are attributed to the friars, thus losing an opportunity to gauge the extent to which some kind of indigenous voice might coexist with a clerical one in such sources. These comments aside, Pardo has created a readable, detailed, and insightful analysis of the slowly evolving and highly variegated process of evangelization as it emerged from the minds of Mexican mendicant clergy. The author pays very careful attention to precontact Catholic thinking about the nature and celebration of each sacrament under study. …

Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (review)

Reviewed by: Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II Richard Gribble C.S.C. Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II. By Kevin E. Schmiesing. [Studies in Ethics and Economics.] (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 2004. Pp. xvi, 185. $75.00 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) In Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II, Kevin Schmiesing, a research fellow in history at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has provided scholars and others interested in American Catholicism a thorough, well organized, and adeptly written intellectual history of Catholic social thought on economic policy and systems during the first half of the twentieth century. This monograph fills a lacuna by its revisionist presentation of how American Catholic thinkers addressed problems and proposed solutions to the social question from the publication of Rerum Novarum (1891) to the beginning of Vatican Council II. The book in every way is a significant contribution to the literature. Schmiesing initially presents his basic theme, that Catholics who wrote on economic issues between 1891 and 1962 did so, based not solely on strictly authentic Catholic social teaching, but rather on the same complex set of factors that informed the views of non-Catholics of the period. He well supports his thesis through an informative introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion that analyze in chronological order how American Catholic social thinkers have addressed economic issues during this seventy-year period. Starting in Colonial and early nineteenth-century America, Schmiesing shows how American Catholics made no reference to church documentation when addressing economic social issues of the day. During the age of reform, 1890 to 1940, the author demonstrates that various opinions on the meaning and application of Rerum Novarum were used by American Catholic social thinkers to show Catholicism's compatibility with the virtues of middle America. People like William Kerby, his famous student John Ryan, and William Stang applied Leo XIII's social encyclical differently, but they also used various economic theories, denying the idea of the absolute character of economic laws. Even the conservative [End Page 867] German-American Frederick Kunkel used contemporary ideas in his thinking. Speaking of Rerum Novarum, Schmiesing concludes, "The ways in which they [social thinkers] applied its mandates to the American situation varied widely" (p. 46). Schmiesing then reviews the 1920's and the New Deal era showing how Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno was variously understood and applied by such notables as John Ryan, Dorothy Day, Virgil Michel, and Frederick Kunkel. The author concludes by reviewing how Catholic social thinkers in the 1950's, where debates on anti-Communism and capitalism dominated the scene, continued to present their views drawing from the views of non-Catholics as well as church teaching. Schmiesing's monograph has several important features that enhance its usability. The prose is very clear, concise, and well organized. Readers are provided information and analysis in rapid order. This is a very scholarly work as evidenced by the numerous, detailed, and informative endnotes. The author provides readers with a highly functional bibliography that is arranged by subject for easier reference. Another significant element of this book is the author's choice to introduce readers to economic thinkers who are rarely if ever mentioned in the literature, including James Gillis, C.S.P., Edward Keller, C.S.C., and Goetz Briefs. Within the Market Strife is a scholarly achievement that adds greatly to American Catholic scholarship of the twentieth century. Professional and interested readers of Catholic intellectual history will find this volume a welcome addition to their bookshelves. Richard Gribble C.S.C. Stonehill College Copyright © 2005 The Catholic University of America Press

The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on Fides et Ratio, edited by David Ruel Foster & Joseph W. Koterski, SJ

The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on Fides et Ratio, edited by David Ruel Foster & Joseph W. Koterski, SJ

A Fearful Asymmetry in Contemporary Catholic Thought

A Fearful Asymmetry in Contemporary Catholic Thought

Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 293. £42.50

Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 293. £42.50

Barth and Rome a Critical Engagement with Catholic Thinkers

Barth and Rome a Critical Engagement with Catholic Thinkers

Book Review: Christian Contradictions: The Structure of Lutheran and Catholic Thought

Book Review: Christian Contradictions: The Structure of Lutheran and Catholic Thought

Editor’s Note

The Thomist 69 (2005) EDITOR'S NOTE JOSEPH TORCHIA, 0.P. I consider it a great honor to be named editor of a review which has defined itself as "Steward of the Thomistic tradition." As I begin my tenure in this capacity, I wish to comment briefly about my own sense of our mission, not in the language of some pronouncement, but merely as one man's opinion about the task implicit in our somewhat lofty motto. In my reckoning, this task encompasses two complementary roles. On the one hand, we seek serious scholarly investigations into the sources and development of Christian wisdom that focus primarily (but not exclusively) upon the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. But good stewardship involves more than a custodial role. Reflection on the riches of the past must also inspire and sustain a response to contemporary problems. This publication has consistently proceeded from the premise that Thomism is a living tradition that can speak to those issues that run to the core of our being as rational creatures made in the image and likeness of God. Shortly after assuming the editorship, I examined The Thomist's 1939 "Announcement of Publication." I was immediately struck by the enthusiasm for a new venture "launched on the postulate that Dominicans have something very special to offer this twentieth century of ours."1 As I consider these words some sixty-six years later, I propose the following question: what can a distinctively Dominican speculative review of theology and philosophy offer at the beginning of this new millennium? Indeed, the vision that inspired and guided our founders must be ours as well-nothing less than a contribution "to originality of thought, to solutions rather than compromises with immediately pressing questions."2 These goals, in fact, are wholly consistent with the Dominican charism and its commitment to learned preaching 1 Excerpt from The Thomist's "Announcement of Publication," 1. 2 Ibid., 15. EDITOR'S NOTE according to the ideal of contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere, that is, "to contemplate and bring what is contemplated to others." This ideal rests on the conviction that the life of the mind must translate into a passion to share its fruits in a concrete context. Our model in this endeavor is St. Thomas Aquinas himself. Aquinas fixed his contemplative gaze on truth. But ever the teacher, he sought to communicate truth in conversance with all the intellectual currents of his time. In the process, he forged a bold new synthesis of faith and reason versatile enough to speak to a wide range of outlooks and horizons of inquiry. This is why he could adapt and harmonize traditions that his contemporaries perceived as wholly incommensurable with such creativity and imagination. If Aquinas is the "perennial philosopher," it is because his thought affirms an openness to truth wherever it can be discerned. By the same token, he shows us that any search for truth must be guided by that Divine Wisdom whose ultimate source is in God, the ground of meaning and intelligibility. This is the Light that guided him throughout his inquiries, and it must be the Light that guides us in our own, as we confront the unique moral dilemmas that the present century opens to Catholic thinkers. This Light never undermines human reasoning; it only perfects it, and thereby raises the bar of our rational efforts to new heights. We live in an age that presents great challenges to those committed to the intellectual enterprise of the Catholic Church. And for those who endorse the Thomistic vision of reality, the need for "originality of thought" and "solutions rather than compromises" is more compelling than ever before in the history of this review. At a time when pluralism is widely valued above objectivity, it is all too easy to take refuge in one's own conceptual framework or ideological perspective, and thereby to exclude the possibility of genuine dialogue with one's opponents at the outset. But in the spirit of Aquinas, we do not perceive disagreement as an insurmountable obstacle. Rather, we welcome it as the occasion to advance the debate, and in the process to explore the possibility of consensus and a resolution...

Book Reviews: History of Catholic Thought

Book Reviews: History of Catholic Thought