Why So Sad? The Sorrows that Kill and the Sorrows that Save – Sr. Anna Wray, O.P.

Sr. Anna Wray argues that sorrow can either deform the soul as acedia or save it when rightly faced, and she offers a Thomistic account of how sorrow, friendship with God, and spiritual remedies shape the Christian life.This lecture was given on November 6th, 2025, at Iowa State University.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Sister Anna Wray is a native of Connecticut and a member of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia of Nashville, TN.  Sister received her PhD in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, having written her dissertation on Aristotle’s account of the activity of contemplation.  Sister is an assistant professor on the faculty of CUA's School of Philosophy in Washington, DC, where she regularly teaches courses in rhetoric, philosophy of religion, and philosophical psychology.  She is also an adjunct professor for Aquinas College, where she teaches metaphysics and epistemology to her sisters in formation.  Her research and conversational interests include imagination and attention in human agency and speech, the effects of technology on human agency, and form as function and unifying activity.Keywords: Acedia, Contemplation, Friendship With God, Gratitude, Sorrow, Sabbath, Thomistic Psychology, Spiritual Remedies

Fr. Stephen Ryan argues that the Old Testament remains a vital guide to prayer and the spiritual life because Scripture reveals God’s friendship, sanctifies time, and forms the practices of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting.This lecture was given on February 19th, 2026, at University of Tulsa.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Fr. Stephen Ryan was born and raised in Boston and entered the Order of Preachers in 1987. He was ordained a priest in 1993 and, on completion of doctoral studies in Scripture, was assigned to the Dominican House of Studies in 2000. He teaches Scripture and the biblical languages.Keywords: Almsgiving, Ascetical Life, Bible And Prayer, Friendship With God, Liturgical Year, Old Testament, Prayer, Sabbath, Spiritual Life

Prof. Michael Dauphinais contends that modern Christians, formed by empiricism, individualism, and a this‑worldly hope that easily turns to despair, especially need the Eucharist because it is the concrete, sacramental way Christ draws us into the Trinitarian communion for which we were created, making his paschal mystery present and reproducing his own filial relation to the Father in us.This lecture was given on November 14th, 2025, at University of Oklahoma.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Michael A. Dauphinais, Ph.D., serves as the Fr. Matthew Lamb Professor of Catholic Theology and the co-director of the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida.  He has co-authored with Matthew Levering Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Thomas Aquinas; Holy People, Holy Land: A Theological Introduction to the Bible; and The Wisdom of the Word: Biblical Answers to Ten Questions about Catholicism. He specializes in C.S. Lewis, the Bible, and St. Thomas Aquinas. He speaks frequently in both academic and popular settings, and particularly enjoys visiting Thomistic Institute student chapters. Dr. Dauphinais hosts The Catholic Theology Show podcast to help a wide audience discover the richness of coming to know and love God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.Keywords: Aquinas on the Eucharist, Creed and Sacraments, Gospel of John, Modernity and Empiricism, Paschal Mystery, Real Presence, Sacramental Communion, Trinitarian Self‑Gift, 1 Corinthians

Prof. Gavin D’Costa explains how, since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has rethought its relationship to Judaism by affirming the enduring validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, recovering the Church’s identity as a fundamentally Jewish–Gentile reality, and opening unresolved but fertile questions about mission, ecclesiology, and antisemitism.This lecture was given on October 9th, 2025, at University of Edinburgh.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Gavin D’Costa is Professor of Catholic-Jewish Relations at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Rome; and Emeritus Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Bristol. He is author of seven books, most recently: Christianity and the World Religions. Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions, (2009); Vatican II and the World Religions, (OUP, 2014) and Catholic Doctrines on the Jewish People after Vatican II, (OUP, 2019) He is an advisor to the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Bishops in England and Wales, and to the Church of England, Board of Mission on matters related to other religions. He is a published poet and worked on musical poetry with composer John Pickard and has two discs.Keywords: Antisemitism, Covenant, Hebrew Catholics, Interfaith Dialogue, Lumen Gentium 16, Nostra Aetate 4, Post‑Conciliar Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, Supersessionism, Vatican II and the Jews

Prof. Michael Root argues that, in Catholic theology, we are saved wholly by the unmerited grace of Christ, and that this grace brings us into a Spirit‑given life of faith, hope, love, and morally significant works, so that eternal life is at once pure gift and, in a secondary sense, a “merited destiny.”This lecture was given on September 9th, 2025, at North Carolina State University.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Michael Root is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. Earlier in life, he was a Lutheran, teaching at various Lutheran seminaries and serving ten years as a Research Professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2010. His particular theological interests lie in grace and justification, eschatology (death, heaven, hell, etc.), and Protestant-Catholic relations.Keywords: Augustine and Pelagius, Council of Trent, Grace and Merit, Justification, Luther’s Sola Fide, St. Thomas Aquinas, Teleological Salvation, Faith Hope and Love, Works and Final Judgment

Fr. Dominic Langevin defends the Catholic priesthood as a divinely willed, sacramental system of mediation in which ordained men, configured to Christ the High Priest, bestow God’s gifts on the faithful and offer their prayers and sins to God, thereby promoting both God’s glory and the sanctification and dignity of the Church.This lecture was given on November 10th, 2025, at West Virginia University.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Fr. Dominic Langevin, O.P., is the dean and an assistant professor of dogmatic theology at the Dominican House of Studies, where he teaches courses principally about the sacraments and the liturgy. He did his undergraduate degree at Yale University. He entered the Dominican Order in 1998 and was ordained a priest in 2005. He earned his doctorate from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of the book From Passion to Paschal Mystery, has been editor of the journal The Thomist, and has been the secretary/treasurer of the Academy of Catholic Theology.Keywords: Christ the High Priest, Hierarchy, Holy Orders, Mediation and Sacraments, Ministerial Priesthood, In Persona Christi, Sacramental System, Why the Church Has Priests

Fr. John Baptist Ku unpacks St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of predestination, showing how God’s universal salvific will, efficacious grace, and real human freedom coexist without collapsing into Calvinist double predestination or Pelagian self-salvation.This lecture was given on November 22nd, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Fr. John Baptist Ku was born in Manhattan (1965) and grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. After graduating from School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia, he worked in software design at AT&T for five years before entering the Dominican Order in 1992. After obtaining his S.T.B./M.Div. (1998) and S.T.L. (2000) at the Dominican House of Studies, he served for three years in St. Pius Parish in Providence, R.I., before going on to complete his studies doctoral studies at the University of Fribourg in 2009. He was awarded the Thomas Aquinas Dissertation Prize by the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University (2010) for his dissertation on God the Father in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. He now teaches at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., where he has also served as book review editor of The Thomist, chaplain to commuter students, and chaplain to the Immaculate Conception Chapter of Third Order Dominicans.Keywords: Aquinas on Predestination, Divine Providence, Efficacious and Sufficient Grace, Free Will and Foreknowledge, Molinism and Middle Knowledge, Reprobation, Single Predestination, Universal Salvific Will

Prof. Thomas Osborne clarifies how, for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the distinctive immateriality of human intellectual knowledge grounds a philosophical case for the soul’s immortality, going beyond today’s narrower “problem of consciousness.”This lecture was given on October 16th, 2025, at University of Connecticut.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D, Duke University, 2001) is the Frank A. Rudman Endowed Chair in Philosophy and the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas.  He has published widely on Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, and medieval and late scholastic philosophy.  His interests cover moral psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and metaphysics. His latest book is Thomas Aquinas on Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2024).Keywords: Aristotle's De Anima, Immaterial Intellect, Immortality of the Soul, Intentional Presence, Philosophy of Mind, Soul, Subsistent Form, Universals and Knowledge

Prof. Marshall Bierson uses Aristotle’s distinction between work, play, and deeper “energetic” activities to argue that friendship and contemplation uniquely allow us to “rest” in what is truly good and meaningful, and then shows how Aquinas radicalizes this by making both contemplation and friendship with God the heart of human fulfillment.This lecture was given on November 20th, 2025, at Cornell University.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Marshall Bierson is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America. His research centers on the intersection of ethics and philosophical anthropology. He is particularly focused on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and in exploring how her Thomisticly inflected philosophical psychology clarifies moral absolutes.Keywords: Aristotle, Energeia and Kinesis, Friendship and Contemplation, Meaning of Human Activity, Nihilism and Work–Play, Practical and Theoretical Reason, Thomistic Friendship with God

Dr. Erik Dempsey explains how St. Thomas Aquinas sees pleasure as a natural and God-given part of the good life, one that both signals our true human ends and yet must be disciplined by temperance in a fallen world.This lecture was given on December 4th, 2025, at Southern Methodist University.For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.About the Speakers:Professor Erik Dempsey an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Departments of Government, Classics, and Religious Studies, and is the Assistant Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin for over ten years, during which time he has offered classes in the history of political philosophy, on the Bible and its interpreters, on American political thought, on classical philosophy and literature, and others. His favorite classes to teach are Jerusalem and Athens, a class comparing the political, moral, and theological ideas of the Hebrew Bible to Aristotle's, and the Question of Relativism, a class on what he considers the central quandary of our time. He writes primarily about Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and he is currently studying John Locke's commentaries on St. Paul's epistles. Last but not least, he is an Eagle Scout.Keywords: Asceticism and Grace, Desire, Natural Law, Original Sin, Pleasure and Temperance, Screwtape Letters, Virtue and the Good Life