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The DSPT Annual Aquinas Lecture

The Annual Aquinas Lecture is our pre-eminent, public, scholarly event. It is designed to engage contemporary scholarship and culture in a way that enriches both. Scholars from DSPT and elsewhere present topics related to current research in the field of Thomistic studies.

Past Aquinas Lectures

2019 - Dr. Mirela Oliva, University of St. Thomas, Houston. “Causality in the Human Life” 

2018 - Therese Scarpelli Cory, University of Notre Dame, “What does it mean to be immaterial?”  

2017 - Marianne Farina, CSC, “Guides for the Perplexed: Aquinas and al-Ghazali on the Moral Life”

2016 – Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, “Life, Language and Christ: A Thomistic Approach”

2015 – Michael Morris, OP, “Saint Thomas Aquinas in Legend and Art”

2014 – Diana Fritz Cates, “Hatred in the Light of Love: A Thomistic Analysis”

2013 – Augustine Thompson, OP, “Baptismal Theology and Practice in the Age of St. Thomas Aquinas”

2012 – Michael Tkacz, PhD, “Albert the Great and the New Aristotelianism: A Turning Point in the Western Intellectual Tradition”

2011 – Bryan Kromholtz, OP, STD, “The Dead in Christ Will Rise: Thomas Aquinas and Current Ideas on the Time of the Resurrection”

2010 – Bruce Marshall, PhD, “Christ and Israel: An Unresolved Question in Catholic Theology”

2009 – Margarita Vega, PhD, “The Ontology of Art: An Anthropological Perspective”

2008 – Eleonore Stump, PhD, “Thomas Aquinas and the Problem of Human Suffering”

2007 – Thomas S. Hibbs, PhD, “Everything that Rises Must Converge: Aquinas's Theological Re-formation of the Cardinal Virtues”

2006 – Fr. Anselm Ramelow, OP, “Language Without Reduction - Aquinas on the Linguistic Turns”

2005 – Most Rev. Allen H. Vigneron, ThD, “Gratitude and Religion of the Day: A Theological Enquiry into a Pastoral Question”

2004 – Gregory Tatum, OP, “Prolegomena to a “Grammar” of Theosis in the New Testament”

2003 – Eugene Ludwig, OFM, CAP, “Religion and Philosophy in the Big City: Alexandria in the Late Fourth Century”

2002 – Aquinas Symposium

• David Burrell, CSC, “Aquinas’ Use of the Liber de Causis to Formulate the Creator as Cause-Of-Being”
• Fran O’Rourke, “Unity in Aquinas’ Neoplatonic Commentaries”
• Mark Damien Delp, “Abstract and Concrete Names: Logic and Metaphysics in Aquinas’ Platonic Commentaries”
• Richard Schenk, OP, “From Providence to Grace: Dionysius in the Mid- Thirteenth Century”
• Vivian Boland, OP, “Thinking About Good: Aquinas on Divine Names IV, De Hebdomadibus and Nicomachean Ethics I”.
• Wayne John Hankey, “Thomas’ Neoplatonic Histories: His Following of Simplicis”

2001 – Benedict Ashley, OP, “Aquinas, Creation and Cosmic Evolution”

2000 – Gonzalo Ituarte Verdusco, OP, “Aquinas and Las Casas: Two Fighters for the Truth of Christ Revealed in the Poor”

1999 – Hilary Martin, OP, “Thomas Aquinas on Mission”

1998 – Robert Barron, “Thomas Aquinas’ Christological Reading of God and the Creature”

1997 – Richard Schenk, OP, “Towards a More Ambiguous Ambivalence: To What Degree are Pluralistic Theories of Religion ‘Capable of a Crisis in their Basic Concepts’”

1996 – Thomas O’Meara, OP, “Tarzan, Las Casas, and Rahner: Outside of Christianity. Thomas Aquinas’ Theology of Salvation”

1995 – Edward Krasevac, OP, “Questing for Jesus: Need We Continue? Reflections of a Systematic Theologian on ‘the historical Jesus’.”

1993 – Gregory Rocca, OP, “Hovering over the Abyss: Aquinas on God-Talk” Jean Porter “Does Aquinas Believe in Moral Rules’?”

1992 – David Burrell, CSC, “Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam”

1991 – Michael Dodds, OP, “Thomas Aquinas, Human Suffering, and the Unchanging God of Love”