About

Here on the Think Like Aquinas blog, I have two goals.  The first is very personal:  I want to read through Aquinas’s writings, and this blog is a place where I can keep my notes and invite questions.  During my undergraduate work at Thomas Aquinas College, and again while pursuing a masters degree at the International Theological Institute, and yet again while earning a doctoral degree at Marquette University, I have studied parts of the Summa closely.  But there are gigantic swaths of Aquinas’s work I have never clapped eyes on.

But the reality is that I mostly read what I have to teach.  So my second goal is to use this website as a way to helping my students, who are reading along with me.  That’s why the blog posts up so far relate exclusively to texts used in the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College, where I teach.  This fall, I’m trying something new:  I’m going to offer a kind of online companion to my “Mystery of the Trinity” course.  It will be more in the way of a podcast than a blog series, commenting chapter-by-chapter on Aquinas’s Compendium of Theology.  The audio recordings will not attempt to explain Aquinas’s argument in full, since that is the goal of our face-to-face seminar discussions, but I hope they will help my students and anyone else who stops by to dig a little deeper into this little-known masterpiece by the Angelic Doctor.

And why St. Thomas Aquinas?

Here I am, trying to think like Aquinas.

St. Thomas Aquinas was not perfect.  But he was such a towering figure, easily the greatest of all the doctors of the Church, and recommended by countless popes, that we can safely take Aquinas as our starting point for defining the habits of the theologian.  Hence the title of this blog:  “Think Like Aquinas.”  In my reading I hope to absorb Aquinas’s habits more deeply and more consciously.

For more about me, and for wider ramblings about family and life and the universe, see my personal blog New Song.