The Thomistic Institute

Merry Christmas from the Thomistic Institute! This week, we are reposting some of our favorite talks related to Christmas and the Incarnation of our Lord. This talk was given on November 14, 2015, as part of the Thomistic Circles conference entitled, "The Wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas" in New York City. For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. currently serves as rector of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome (the “Angelicum”). Fr. White grew up in southeast Georgia in an inter-religious household. He completed his bachelor’s in religious studies from Brown University (1993) and his Master’s (1995) and Doctorate (2002) in Theology at Oxford University. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2003. He completed his licentiate in Sacred Theology (2007) at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He professed final vows on May 17, 2007, and on May 23, 2008, was ordained a priest. His research and teaching have focused on topics related to Thomistic metaphysics, Christology and Roman Catholic-Reformed ecumenical dialogue. He was appointed an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2011. Fr. White taught at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C from 2008-2018. He was also the founder and Director of the Washington DC Thomistic Institute from 2009 until his departure for Rome in 2018. In 2015 White became a co-editor of Nova et Vetera Journal, an American Catholic Theological journal. In 2018 he was assigned to teach at the Angelicum and function as the Director of the Angelicum Thomistic Institute. In June of 2021, he was appointed rector of the Angelicum. Fr. White is also a musician and one of the founding members of the American folk and bluegrass band, The Hillbilly Thomists, for which he sings and plays the banjo, dulcimer and steel guitar. The U.S.-based group, made up of Dominican friars, has released two albums since 2017.

Merry Christmas from the Thomistic Institute! This week, we are reposting some of our favorite talks related to Christmas and the Incarnation of our Lord. This talk was given on November 14, 2015 as part of the Thomistic Circles conference "The Wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas" in New York City. For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. currently serves as rector of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome (the “Angelicum”). Fr. White grew up in southeast Georgia in an inter-religious household. He completed his bachelor’s in religious studies from Brown University (1993) and his Master’s (1995) and Doctorate (2002) in Theology at Oxford University. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2003. He completed his licentiate in Sacred Theology (2007) at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He professed final vows on May 17, 2007, and on May 23, 2008, was ordained a priest. His research and teaching have focused on topics related to Thomistic metaphysics, Christology and Roman Catholic-Reformed ecumenical dialogue. He was appointed an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2011. Fr. White taught at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C from 2008-2018. He was also the founder and Director of the Washington DC Thomistic Institute from 2009 until his departure for Rome in 2018. In 2015 White became a co-editor of Nova et Vetera Journal, an American Catholic Theological journal. In 2018 he was assigned to teach at the Angelicum and function as the Director of the Angelicum Thomistic Institute. In June of 2021, he was appointed rector of the Angelicum. Fr. White is also a musician and one of the founding members of the American folk and bluegrass band, The Hillbilly Thomists, for which he sings and plays the banjo, dulcimer and steel guitar. The U.S.-based group, made up of Dominican friars, has released two albums since 2017.

Merry Christmas from the Thomistic Institute! This week, we are reposting some of our favorite talks related to Christmas and the Incarnation of our Lord. Fr. Hofer's handout can be found here: tinyurl.com/55cnce22 This lecture was given on December 19, 2021, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., during the intellectual retreat entitled, "Of the Father’s Love Begotten: An Intellectual Retreat on the Incarnation" for the Thomistic Institute’s Texas-area campus chapters. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Father Andrew Hofer, O.P., grew up as the youngest of ten children on a Kansas farm. He entered the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in 1995 and professed simple vows the following year. He made his profession of solemn vows in the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, and was ordained a deacon in 2001 and a priest in 2002. His assignments have included serving as a parochial vicar in Rhode Island, a missionary in Kenya, a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame, a formator at the Dominican House of Studies, and a member of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. He is finishing a book titled The Word in Our Flesh: A Return to Patristic Preaching, whose research the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship funded through its Teacher-Scholar Grant.

Merry Christmas from the Thomistic Institute! This week, we are reposting some of our favorite talks related to Christmas and the Incarnation of our Lord. Fr. Hofer's handout can be found here: tinyurl.com/ycc663wz This lecture was given on December 18, 2021, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., during "Of the Father’s Love Begotten: An Intellectual Retreat on the Incarnation" for the Thomistic Institute’s Texas-area campus chapters. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Father Andrew Hofer, O.P., grew up as the youngest of ten children on a Kansas farm. He entered the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in 1995 and professed simple vows the following year. He made his profession of solemn vows in the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, and was ordained a deacon in 2001 and a priest in 2002. His assignments have included serving as a parochial vicar in Rhode Island, a missionary in Kenya, a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame, a formator at the Dominican House of Studies, and a member of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. He is finishing a book titled The Word in Our Flesh: A Return to Patristic Preaching, whose research the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship funded through its Teacher-Scholar Grant.

This talk was given on October 13, 2022, at the University of Edinburgh. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomsiticinstitute.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.

Join Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P. of Aquinas 101, Godsplaining, and Pints with Aquinas for an off-campus conversation with Prof. Jonathan Lunine about his latest Thomistic Institute lecture, "Catholicism and Evolution from an Astronomical Perspective.” Catholicism and Evolution w/ Fr. Gregory Pine (Off-Campus Conversations) You can listen to the original lecture here: https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/evolution-and-catholicism-from-an-astronomical-perspective-prof-jonathan-lunine For more information on upcoming events, please visit www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Jonathan I. Lunine is The David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, His research focuses on astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition to his responsibilities in the classroom, he serves as Interdisciplinary Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope project and is a coinvestigator on the Juno mission currently in orbit around Jupiter. Lunine is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Dominique Cassini Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is the author of Astrobiology: A Multidisciplinary Approach and Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World. Lunine obtained a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the University of Rochester (1980), an M.S. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology. He lives in Ithaca New York, where he is a member of St. Catherine of Siena parish. In 2016 Lunine helped to found the Society of Catholic Scientists and currently serves as its vice president.

Prof. Lunine's slides can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/4fce6w7w This lecture was given on October 6, 2022, at the University of Rochester. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Jonathan I. Lunine is The David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, His research focuses on astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition to his responsibilities in the classroom, he serves as Interdisciplinary Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope project and is a coinvestigator on the Juno mission currently in orbit around Jupiter. Lunine is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Dominique Cassini Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is the author of Astrobiology: A Multidisciplinary Approach and Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World. Lunine obtained a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the University of Rochester (1980), an M.S. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology. He lives in Ithaca New York, where he is a member of St. Catherine of Siena parish. In 2016 Lunine helped to found the Society of Catholic Scientists and currently serves as its vice president.

This lecture was given on October 4th, 2022, at the University of North Carolina. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Fr. Albert Trudel, O.P. (Dominican House of Studies) specializes in the intersection between theology and literature in the Middle Ages, and has lately commented on Dante's Purgatorio and the Middle English Pearl for various Thomistic Institute projects. He completed his Master's degree in English Literature at the University of Toronto, his doctoral work in English Literature at the University of Oxford, and he received a postdoctoral License in Mediaeval Studies at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. He is an Assistant Professor of Latin and Pastoral Studies at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He is also the Rome Director for the Thomistic Institute's semester abroad program.

This talk was given on October 19th, 2022, at Saint Rita Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Reginald Lynch, O.P. is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Historical Theology at the Dominican House of Studies. Born in New Hampshire, Fr. Lynch entered the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in 2007, and was ordained a priest in 2013. After ordination, he served at St. Patrick Parish in Columbus, Ohio and taught at the Pontifical College Josephinum, before going on to complete a PhD in theology at the University of Notre Dame, with a major concentration in medieval theology and minor concentrations in patristics and philosophical theology. He has written on a variety of topics in sacramental, systematic and historical theology in journals like The Thomist and Nova et Vetera. His book, The Cleansing of the Heart: The Sacraments as Instrumental Causes in the Thomistic Tradition (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017) received the Charles Cardinal Journet Prize in 2018. Currently, he is working on a book on the reception of Aquinas’ Eucharistic theology in the early modern period.

This lecture was given on November 3, 2022, at the University of Texas at Austin. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Brad S. Gregory is Professor of History and Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2003, and where he is also the Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. From 1996-2003 he taught at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. He specializes in the history of Christianity in Europe during the Reformation era and on the long-term influence of the Reformation era on the modern world. He has given invited lectures at many of the most prestigious universities in North America, as well as in England, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. Before teaching at Stanford, he earned his Ph.D. in history at Princeton University and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows; he also has two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999) received six book awards. Professor Gregory was the recipient of two teaching awards at Stanford and has received three more at Notre Dame. In 2005, he was named the inaugural winner of the first annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities, a $50,000 award from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture given to the outstanding midcareer humanities scholar in the United States. His most recent book is entitled The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), which received two book awards. His forthcoming book is entitled Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts that Continue to Shape Our World (Harper, 2017).