When I first read Anna Karenina, the character of Dolly stayed with me, nagging me to go back to her, to pay more attention to her. When I reread the novel, I found in Dolly, the secondary character and unacknowledged heroine of Tolstoy’s novel,[1] a paradigmatic example of what it
If Aquinas’s solution emerges from all of Kant’s problems, in what sense, then, can there be a resurrection of Thomas? Is the only possible characterization of Aquinas one where his philosophy and theology resemble to no small degree the artistic world of his fellow Dominican Fiesole, both of whose clearly
St. Thomas deals with free will and impeccability on several occasions: first, around 1254–1256, in his commentary on the second book of the Sentences; then, in 1258 or 1259, in the De Veritate; around 1259–1261, in the third book of the Contra Gentiles; around 1265–1268, in the first part of the
Thus the first service to politics rendered by the Christian faith is that it liberates man from the irrationality of political myths, which are the real threat of our time. Taking a stand for sobriety, which does what is possible and does not cry with an ardent heart after the
One of the great political fights in medieval Christendom affected St. Thomas Aquinas’s own studies as a youngster. A fortuitous military conflict between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX spilling into the abbey of Monte Cassino, where Aquinas was doing his elementary studies, led to his parents sending him