The Thomistic Institute

Prof. Steven Jensen explores the issue of free will and moral responsibility, arguing that we are genuine authors of our actions only if our choices are self-determined and not merely the inevitable result of heredity, environment, or internal states shaped by outside forces. This lecture was given on September 30th, 2025, at Georgia Institute of Technology. For more information on upcoming events...

Dr. William Hurlbut examines how natural neuroplasticity, education, lifestyle, and new neurotechnologies are “rewiring the brain,” highlighting both their therapeutic promise and their dangers in an age of addictive digital culture, standardized schooling, and powerful biotechnological interventions. This lecture was given on October 27th, 2025, at University of Rochester. For more information on...

Fr. Chris Gault explores whether AI like ChatGPT should change how or why we study, showing that while machines can accelerate information processing, only human study forms our minds, virtues, and relationship to truth in a way that leads to real fulfillment. This lecture was given on November 18th, 2025, at Galway University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitut...

Prof. Tomás Bogardus asks whether a machine can truly understand by unpacking how large language models like ChatGPT function and arguing that genuine knowledge requires rational insight and responsibility to truth that go beyond statistical text prediction. This lecture was given on November 17th, 2025, at University of Georgia. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstit...

Dr. Christopher Mooney asks "whether God really cares about our suffering" and uses biblical narratives, the significance of Christ’s tears, and philosophical responses to death in order to answer in the affirmative, ultimately showing that God can form a greater good from evil without making the evil into something good. This lecture was given on October 9th, 2025, at University of Louisiana at L...

Sr. Elinor Gardner asks whether suffering can be called “good” by engaging Stoic thinkers like Seneca, modern echoes in Nietzsche, and biblical wisdom to show how God can use painful trials to heal and deepen the soul without glorifying evil itself. This lecture was given on September 11th, 2025, at University of North Texas. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute....

Prof. Chris Baglow explores how the God of love can allow evil and suffering by showing that a world created for freedom and love—not as a deterministic machine—necessarily entails the risk of physical and moral evils, yet opens a deeper path of redemptive goodness. This lecture was given on October 30th, 2025, at Mississippi State University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at t...

Prof. Paul Gondreau explores how Christ’s concrete, fully human life uniquely “fully reveals man to himself,” showing that every human person and all of history are teleologically ordered to him as the final Adam and measure of authentic humanity. This lecture was given on November 20th, 2025, at The Ohio State University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org...

Dr. Robert McNamara explores how creation is not a distant event but our very act of existing here and now, so that each person’s being is itself a continuous relation of absolute dependence on God that can be freely understood, accepted, and joyfully affirmed. This lecture was given on December 2nd, 2025, at Queen's University at Belfast. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomi...

Dr. Erik Dempsey explores whether we make morality or discover it by unpacking Aquinas’s three natural inclinations and arguing that they ground objective, inescapable moral obligations rather than mere social conventions. This lecture was given on October 11th, 2025, at Michigan State University. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events . About t...

Prof. John Cuddeback reflects on why many students feel relationally unsatisfied in a hyper-connected world and shows how reclaiming embodied presence, intentional discernment of a few trustworthy friends, and technology-limited, silence-friendly communal spaces can restore the depth, vulnerability, and shared pursuit of the good that real friendship requires. This lecture was given on September 2...

Prof. Michael Krom explores how athletic rivalry, when rooted in justice and love of the good, can deepen genuine friendship, build virtue, and lead toward a contemplative vision of life. This lecture was given on November 13th, 2025, at Indiana University. Through your gift to the Thomistic Institute, you will send the best scholars in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition directly to college campu...

Prof. Joshua Hochschild argues that digital culture reshapes friendship and attention through Curiositas and acedia, offering a path of renewal by cultivating virtue, mindful leisure, and rooted communal belonging. This lecture was given on November 5th, 2025, at John Hopkins University. Thanks to a group of generous donors, every dollar you send up to $150,000 before December 31 will be matched ....

Prof. Michael Dauphinais explains marriage as a lifelong covenant of self-giving love between a man and a woman that images Christ’s union with the Church, ordered to the spouses’ sanctification and the procreation and education of children . This lecture was given on October 15th, 2025, at Iowa State University. Through your gift to the Thomistic Institute, you will send the best scholars in the...

Prof. Thomas Ward explains Scotus’s bold claim that the Incarnation is not primarily a response to human sin, but the centerpiece of God’s eternal plan for creation, so that Christ would have become incarnate even if Adam had never fallen . This lecture was given on March 4th, 2025, at Universidad Panamericana. Through your gift to the Thomistic Institute, you will send the best scholars in the Ca...

Fr. Gregory Pine explains that, according to Aquinas, Christians are called to true divinization or theosis: by grace and the sacraments they really come to share in God’s own life without becoming God by nature, growing into intimate communion with the Triune God through Christ in whom this transformation is perfectly realized. This lecture was given on October 3rd, 2025, at Duke University. Thro...

Fr. Terence Crotty argues that Christianity spread so rapidly because it uniquely answered the human search for truth and happiness while transforming social life through charity, dignity for slaves and women, and a compelling vision of a good and loving God that pagan religion and philosophy could not provide.​ This lecture was given on September 6th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies. Through...

Dr. Paul LaPenna uses the dramatic case of a man in a coma from autoimmune brain disease to show that personal identity endures despite severe loss of abilities, arguing from neurology and Thomistic philosophy that a human person is a unified body–soul substance whose soul grounds changing traits over time. This lecture was given on October 17th, 2025, at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village....

Prof. Mats Wahlberg argues that “necessitarian universalism”—the claim that hell is metaphysically impossible and that God must save all rational creatures—is incompatible with core Christian metaphysical commitments, and he develops three Thomistic arguments to show that the possibility of eternal damnation follows from God’s wisdom, respect for created natures, and desire for truly free self-gif...

Prof. Thomas Osborne explains reprobation and the permission of sin in Thomas Aquinas as the asymmetrical counterpart to predestination, where God positively causes the grace and merits leading the elect to glory but only permits the sins of the reprobate without ever willing or causing moral evil, thus safeguarding both divine justice and human responsibility.​ This lecture was given on September...

Fr. Piotr Roszak shows how Thomas Aquinas interprets predestination through a deeply biblical lens, reading predestination as God’s merciful, Christ-centered plan to lead creation freely to a supernatural end and insisting that scriptural context is essential for avoiding deterministic distortions of the doctrine. This lecture was given on September 5th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies. Throug...

Fr. Cajetan Cuddy explains that Thomism is “fixated” on predestination because this doctrine lies at the speculative and practical center of the Thomistic vision of reality, uniting its key philosophical principles and theological convictions about God, creation, grace, and salvation in a single, coherent account. This lecture was given on September 6th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies. Throug...

Fr. Dominic Legge explains predestination as a profoundly hopeful Catholic doctrine rooted in God’s eternal, loving plan to give grace and lead rational creatures freely to the supernatural end of the beatific vision, drawing especially on Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine. This lecture was given on September 5th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies. Through your gift to the Thomistic Insti...

Prof. Raymond Hain examines whether nature “makes” laws by exploring classical and contemporary accounts of natural law, arguing that human moral norms arise from our rational participation in the ordered structure of life and the universe as understood in both philosophy and Catholic thought. This lecture was given on September 8th, 2025, at United States Military Academy. For more information on...

Prof. Matthew Thomas explains why justification—God’s transformative act of making sinners righteous in Christ by grace through faith and incorporation into the Church—is, for Aquinas, greater even than creation, and explores how Catholic teaching on faith, works, and grace can address Reformation-era controversies and open paths toward Protestant–Catholic reconciliation. This lecture was given on...