

The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute exists to promote Catholic truth in our contemporary world by strengthening the intellectual formation of Christians at universities, in the Church, and in the wider public square. The thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Universal Doctor of the Church, is our touchstone.
The Thomistic Institute Podcast features the lectures and talks from our conferences, campus chapters events, intellectual retreats, livestream events, and much more.
Founded in 2009, the Thomistic Institute is part of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC.
The Thomistic Institute Podcast features the lectures and talks from our conferences, campus chapters events, intellectual retreats, livestream events, and much more.
Founded in 2009, the Thomistic Institute is part of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Aug 3, 2022 • 47min
Love, Friendship, and Heavenly Happiness | Prof. Christopher Kaczor
This lecture was given on April 19, 2022 at the University of Dallas.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Dr. Christopher Kaczor (rhymes with razor) is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and a member of the James Madison Society of Princeton University. In 2015, he was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life of Vatican City, and he serves as a Consultor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He graduated from the Honors Program of Boston College and earned a Ph.D. four years later from the University of Notre Dame. A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Kaczor is a former Federal Chancellor Fellow at the University of Cologne and William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is an award winning author of twelve books including The Gospel of Happiness, The Seven Big Myths about Marriage, A Defense of Dignity, The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church, The Ethics of Abortion, Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues; Life IssuesMedical Choices; Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love; The Edge of Life, and Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition. Dr. Kaczor’s views have been in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, National Review, NPR, BBC, EWTN, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, MSNBC, TEDx, and The Today Show.

Aug 2, 2022 • 1h 3min
Counsel & The Limits Of Reason | Prof. Adam Eitel
This lecture was given on July 8, 2022 at the 4th Annual Student Leadership Conference on Faith, Reason, and the Mind’s Ascent to God.
The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/bdct2y69.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Prof. Adam Eitel is an Assistant Professor of Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Dr. Eitel focuses his research and teaching on the history of Christian moral thought, contemporary social ethics and criticism, and modern religious thought. Dr. Eitel has roughly a dozen books, chapters, edited volumes, and articles published or in progress. These include an ethical analysis of drone strikes and a theological account of domination. His current book project explores the role of love in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas. A 2004 Baylor University graduate and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Fribourg, Dr. Eitel received his M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, completing the latter in 2015.

Aug 1, 2022 • 1h 11min
Faith and Apologetics | Fr. John Corbett, OP
This lecture was given on July 8, 2022 at the 4th Annual Student Leadership Conference on Faith, Reason, and the Mind’s Ascent to God.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Fr. Corbett grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and came to know the Dominicans through family members in the Order, through St. Patrick’s Parish, and through attending Providence College, from which he graduated in 1973 with a B.A. in Political Science. Fr. Corbett joined the Dominicans in the summer of 1974 and was ordained a priest on May 12th, 1980. He completed his Licentiate in Sacred Theology in 1981 and began to teach moral theology as well as the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. Three years later he began his doctoral studies under Servais Pinckaers, O.P., at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and was awarded his Ph.D. after completing his dissertation on the theology of virtue in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Fr. Corbett was appointed to the Faculty of the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, in 1991, and spent the next seven years teaching various courses in moral theology, as well as offering retreats, spiritual direction, and personal formation for seminarians. Joining the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in the Fall of 1998, Fr. Corbett teaches in the area of fundamental moral theology and the theology of the virtues, covering material from the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae in four sequential courses. He also offers seminars in Thomistic Action Theory, Contemporary Interpretations of Natural Law, as well as a seminar in the thought of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. He is interested in developing courses on the Ethics of Homicide, as well as on the Development of Casuistry in the Catholic Church.

Jul 29, 2022 • 1h 23min
Wisdom and the Reasons of Love | Prof. Adam Eitel
The podcast discusses St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly the gift of wisdom, and its necessity for living a life in pursuit of God, emphasizing that virtues alone are insufficient without these divine gifts.This lecture was given on July 8, 2022 at the 4th Annual Student Leadership Conference on Faith, Reason, and the Mind’s Ascent to God.For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.About the speaker:
Prof. Adam Eitel is an Assistant Professor of Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Dr. Eitel focuses his research and teaching on the history of Christian moral thought, contemporary social ethics and criticism, and modern religious thought. Dr. Eitel has roughly a dozen books, chapters, edited volumes, and articles published or in progress. These include an ethical analysis of drone strikes and a theological account of domination. His current book project explores the role of love in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas. A 2004 Baylor University graduate and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Fribourg, Dr. Eitel received his M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, completing the latter in 2015.

Jul 29, 2022 • 50min
Off-Campus Conversations, Ep. 001: Prof. Jennifer Frey on Aquinas & the Cardinal Virtues
Join Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P. for an off-campus conversation with Prof. Jenn Frey about her latest Thomistic Institute lecture, "What Makes a Person Good? Aquinas and the Cardinal Virtues."
Off-Campus Conversations with Fr. Gregory Pine, Ep. 001: Prof. Jenn Frey on Aquinas and the Cardinal Virtues
You can listen to the original lecture here: https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/what-makes-a-person-good-aquinas-and-the-cardinal-virtues-prof-jennifer-frey
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org
About the speaker:
Jennifer A. Frey (University of South Carolina) received her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana in 2000, and her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. In 2013 she was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago prior to taking up her current appointment as Assistant Professor in the Philosophy department at the University of South Carolina. Jennifer's research interests lie at the intersection of virtue ethics and action theory. She has publications in The Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Journal of Analytic Philosophy, and in several edited volumes. She is the recipient of several grants, including coa 2.1 million dollar project awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, titled "Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning in Life." She is currently at work on three separate book projects.

Jul 27, 2022 • 1h 17min
What Makes a Person Good? Aquinas and the Cardinal Virtues | Prof. Jennifer Frey
This lecture was given on April 28, 2022 at the College of William and Mary.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Jennifer Frey is an associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology and she has co-edited three volumes on Self-Transcendence and Virtue, Practical Wisdom, and Practical Truth. Her writing has been featured in Breaking Ground, Evangelization and Culture, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today.

Jul 26, 2022 • 1h 12min
Faith And Asceticism | Fr. John Corbett, O.P.
This lecture was given on July 7, 2022 at the 4th Annual Student Leadership Conference on Faith, Reason, and the Mind’s Ascent to God.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Fr. Corbett grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and came to know the Dominicans through family members in the Order, through St. Patrick’s Parish, and through attending Providence College, from which he graduated in 1973 with a B.A. in Political Science. Fr. Corbett joined the Dominicans in the summer of 1974 and was ordained a priest on May 12th, 1980. He completed his Licentiate in Sacred Theology in 1981 and began to teach moral theology as well as the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. Three years later he began his doctoral studies under Servais Pinckaers, O.P., at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and was awarded his Ph.D. after completing his dissertation on the theology of virtue in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Fr. Corbett was appointed to the Faculty of the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, in 1991, and spent the next seven years teaching various courses in moral theology, as well as offering retreats, spiritual direction, and personal formation for seminarians. Joining the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in the Fall of 1998, Fr. Corbett teaches in the area of fundamental moral theology and the theology of the virtues, covering material from the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae in four sequential courses. He also offers seminars in Thomistic Action Theory, Contemporary Interpretations of Natural Law, as well as a seminar in the thought of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. He is interested in developing courses on the Ethics of Homicide, as well as on the Development of Casuistry in the Catholic Church.

Jul 25, 2022 • 44min
Does Nature Make Laws? An Introduction to the Natural Law Tradition | Prof. Joshua Hochschild
This lecture was given on December 1, 2021 at Georgetown University.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Jul 22, 2022 • 1h 22min
Neuroscience and the Soul | Dr. Daniel De Haan
This lecture was given on May 29, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/yckbsbs3.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Daniel De Haan is a Research Fellow in Natural Theology at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford he was a postdoctoral fellow working on the neuroscience strand of the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences project at the University of Cambridge. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven and University of St. Thomas in Texas. His research focuses on philosophical anthropology and the sciences, natural theology, and the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

7 snips
Jul 21, 2022 • 54min
Free Will and the Soul | Prof. Thomas Osborne
This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handouts for the lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/42jmxp7u.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D., Duke 2001), is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and a member of the Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas (Houston). He has written many articles on medieval and late-scholastic philosophy and other topics, and is the author of Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (2005), Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham (2014), and Aquinas's Ethics (2020).