Thomistic Summer Conference

Now entering its fourth consecutive year, the Thomistic Summer Conference is becoming a tradition at Thomas Aquinas College, California. This June 5-8, visiting scholars will reflect on “Thomism in an Age of Renewal.”

By the close of Vatican II, many claimed that Pope St. John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento entailed a turn away from Thomistic philosophy and theology in Catholic higher education. In response, Ralph McInerny wrote Thomism in an Age of Renewal, “out of the conviction that the Church has been right all along in directing us to St. Thomas and She continues to be right.” He granted (with mordant wit) the inadequacy of Thomism taken as a pat “system” to be learned by rote from manuals, but insisted that St. Thomas himself, encountered in his own writings and philosophical spirit, ought to remain “the model and mentor of the intellectual life of Catholics”—including the very work of aggiornamento.

For many years, McInerny was himself a model and mentor for new generations of Thomists. In honor of the 15th anniversary of his death, the fourth Thomistic Summer Conference (a series inspired by McInerny’s own summer conferences at Notre Dame) invites papers on the question he asked in Thomism in an Age of Renewal, renewed in the present: “What in our age is the role of Thomas Aquinas?” We welcome papers on St. Thomas as theologian and philosopher as well as papers on the substantive content of his thought—especially on those subjects that were of special interest to McInerny.

Join us for three days of engaging lectures and lively conversation exploring the thought of St. Thomas, a champion of the essential harmony between faith and reason.

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