Introduction

This lecture was given on September 16, 2023, at the Thomistic Circles Conference at the Dominican House of Studies For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Russell Hittinger is a leading scholar of Catholic political and social thought. From 1996-2019, Dr. Hittinger was the incumbent of the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he was also a Research Professor in the School of Law. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Fordham University, Princeton University, New York University, Providence College, and Charles University in Prague. In January 2020, Dr. Hittinger gave the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, to which he was elected a full member (ordinarius) in 2004 and appointed to the consilium or governing board from 2006-2018. On 8 September 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Dr. Hittinger as an ordinarius in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, in which he finished his ten-year term in 2019. He is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, where he also serves as the inaugural co-director of the Program in Catholic Political Thought.