

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

Jan 27, 2023 • 1h 8min
Made for Another: John Paul II's Theology of the Body and Thomas Aquinas | Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P.
This lecture was given on December 5, 2022, at St. Charles Catholic Church in Arlington, Virginia.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Father Thomas Petri, O.P. is the President of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies, where he also serves as an assistant professor of moral theology and pastoral studies. Ordained a priest in 2009, he holds a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from The Catholic University of America.

Jan 26, 2023 • 42min
Is It Possible to Have Productive Conversations About Abortion? w/ Prof. Angela Knobel
Join Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P. of Aquinas 101, Godsplaining, and Pints with Aquinas for an off-campus conversation with Dr. Angela Knobel about her latest Thomistic Institute, "The Philosophy of the Abortion Debate."
The Philosophy of the Abortion Debate w/ Dr. Angela Knobel and Fr. Gregory Pine (Off-Campus Conversations)
You can listen to the original lecture here:
https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/the-philosophy-of-the-abortion-debate-prof-angela-knobel
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Angela Knobel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. She received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2004. From 2004 to 2020, she taught philosophy at her alma mater, the Catholic University of America. Her work focuses primarily on Aquinas’ theory of infused virtue, virtue ethics and applied ethics. Her book Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.

Jan 25, 2023 • 42min
May Life-Sustaining Treatment Be Withheld or Withdrawn? | Prof. Gina Noia
This lecture was given on December 2, 2022, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Gina Maria Noia is an Assistant Professor of Theology and Resident Bioethicist at Belmont Abbey College. She received her Ph.D. in Theology and Health Care Ethics from Saint Louis University. She has served as a clinical ethicist for OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, IL and St. Alexius Hospital in St. Louis, MO, and she is published in Christian Bioethics and the Journal of Moral Theology. She and her husband, Justin, love spending time with their vivacious one-year-old boy.

Jan 24, 2023 • 53min
Reason, Grace, and Law: Suarez and Hobbes on Coercion, Church, and State | Prof. Thomas Pink
This lecture was given on October 27, 2022, at Harvard University.
For more information, visit thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Professor Thomas Pink read history and philosophy at Cambridge, where he also received his PhD. After working for four years in London and New York for a City merchant bank, he returned to philosophy in 1990 as a Research Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He then lectured at Sheffield University prior to moving to King's in 1996.
Professor Pink’s main interests are in ethics, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of law, and in medieval and early modern philosophy.
He is currently writing on the free will problem - his Free Will: A Very Short Introduction is published by Oxford University Press in June 2004.
He is also working on the nature of moral normativity. Forthcoming on this topic, also from Oxford University Press, is his two volume The Ethics of Action. He is an editor of London Studies in the History of Philosophy, and is also editing The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, containing the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy on free will, for the Clarendon Edition of the works of Hobbes.

Jan 23, 2023 • 1h 3min
Justice and the Common Good According to St. Thomas Aquinas | Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.
This talk was given on November 8, 2022, at the University of Virginia.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
A native of Louisiana, Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P. entered the Province of St. Joseph in 2005. After several years of pastoral work in New York City, Fr. Guilbeau began doctoral studies in moral theology at the University of Fribourg, where he completed a dissertation in moral theology. His topic was Charles De Koninck’s doctrine of the common good. In addition to his teaching, Fr. Guilbeau is prior of the Dominican House of Studies.

Jan 20, 2023 • 47min
Classical and Christian Perspectives on Love and Friendship | Prof. Joshua Hochschild
This talk was given on October 28, 2022, at the Thomistic Institute Chapter in New York City.
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.

Jan 19, 2023 • 1h
Joyful Resistance | Dr. R.J. Snell
This talk was given on December 4, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., as part of the intellectual retreat entitled, "Avoiding Acedia."
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
R.J. Snell is Editor-in-Chief of Public Discourse and Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute. Previously, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.
He earned his M.A. in philosophy at Boston College, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University. His research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ.
Snell is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.

Jan 18, 2023 • 58min
Acedia II: Human Sorrow, Divine Mercy: An Exploration in Catholic Art | Prof. Thomas Hibbs
Prof. Hibbs' slides can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/5xnw4dv8
This talk was given on December 3, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., as part of the intellectual retreat entitled, "Avoiding Acedia."
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Thomas Hibbs is currently President of the University of Dallas, his alma mater.
With degrees from the University of Dallas and the University of Notre Dame, Hibbs taught at Boston College (BC) for 13 years, where he was full professor and department chair in philosophy. At BC, he also served on the Steering Committee for BC's Initiative for the Future of the Church and on the Sub-Committee on Catholic Sexual Teaching. For 16 years, Hibbs was Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University.
Hibbs has written scholarly books on Aquinas, including Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles, and a book on popular culture entitled Shows About Nothing. Hibbs has recently published scholarly articles on MacIntyre and Aquinas (Review of Politics), on Anselm (Anselm Studies), and on Pascal (International Philosophical Quarterly). He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, New Atlantis, The Dallas Morning News, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which his latest piece is a study of the ethical implications of the films of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Jan 17, 2023 • 56min
Acedia I: How Our Sorrows Determine the State of Our Souls | Prof. Thomas Hibbs
This talk was given on December 3, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., as part of the intellectual retreat entitled, "Avoiding Acedia."
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Thomas Hibbs is currently President of the University of Dallas, his alma mater.
With degrees from the University of Dallas and the University of Notre Dame, Hibbs taught at Boston College (BC) for 13 years, where he was full professor and department chair in philosophy. At BC, he also served on the Steering Committee for BC's Initiative for the Future of the Church and on the Sub-Committee on Catholic Sexual Teaching. For 16 years, Hibbs was Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University.
Hibbs has written scholarly books on Aquinas, including Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles, and a book on popular culture entitled Shows About Nothing. Hibbs has recently published scholarly articles on MacIntyre and Aquinas (Review of Politics), on Anselm (Anselm Studies), and on Pascal (International Philosophical Quarterly). He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, New Atlantis, The Dallas Morning News, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which his latest piece is a study of the ethical implications of the films of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Jan 16, 2023 • 1h 2min
Acedia and the Bleaching of Being | Dr. R.J. Snell
This talk was given on December 2, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies as part of "Avoiding Acedia: An Intellectual Retreat."
For more information, please visit thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
R.J. Snell is Editor-in-Chief of Public Discourse and Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute. Previously, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.
He earned his M.A. in philosophy at Boston College, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University. His research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ.
Snell is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.


