Godzdogz

On 30th January Blackfriars held its annual Aquinas Lecture. This year the speaker was Matthew Levering, Professor of Religious Studies at Dayton University, USA. He spoke to a packed hall on the subject of ‘Aquinas and the Gospel’, specifically ‘The Pauline Gospel According to Aquinas’. His major source was the commentary by St Thomas on the letter to the Romans, and he focused on the detailed commentary made by Aquinas on the first three verses of the letter. Read more

The Fourth Lateran Council (November 1215) represents a high-point in ecclesiastical governance in the Middle Ages. It is also of special interest to us here as it formed the backdrop to the establishment of the Order of Preachers in 1216.  Read more

I could not let today pass without saying a quick word about St. Thomas Aquinas, my intellectual hero and generally one of my favorite saints.

Aquinas was born in 1224/5 to a noble family at a time of political tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor. Because Aquinas’s family supported the Emperor in this struggle they sent the young Thomas, after some initial schooling at the famous Benedictine Abbey Monte Casino, to study at the imperial university in Naples. Unlike the ecclesiastical universities, students at Naples were allowed to study Aristotle, whose writings were just beginning to filter back in to the Latin West via the Muslim World.

There was a perception at this time that Aristotelian science lead to conclusions that contradicted revelation and in some circles this science was therefore considered to be a threat to traditional Augustinian theology. It was the genius of Aquinas to synthesize these two streams of thought, the Augustinian and the Aristotelian, by showing the complementary nature of faith and reason.

The result is a liberating vision of the world and human life in which God holds all things in being through his creative love, and calls human beings to live in friendship with him in this life, and eternal happiness with him in the next.  Read more

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Last Thursday, the Oxford Union Society debated the motion, This House would be glad to have gay parents. Speaking for the Proposition were student Crawford Jamieson, journalist Benjamin Cohen, LGBT activist Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, and 'Right Said Fred' vocalist Richard Fairbrass. On the other side were Anthony McCarthy of SPUC, Peter D Williams of Catholic Voices, Pentecostalist minister and political campaigner George Hargreaves, and social commentator Lynette Burrows. Read more

Our series on the Ecumenical councils of the Church here on Godzdogz has so far been dominated by the controversies in the Greek speaking East. The first three Lateran councils, convoked in a 60 year period between 1123 and 1179, mark a shift in focus towards the west. In these councils we see the Church wrestling in a very practical way with the question of authority. In the wake of the Western Roman Empire’s fall, the Papacy had stepped into a power vacuum at the heart of western European society. Yet as the centuries passed and European culture saw a political renewal the Church found it increasingly necessary to resist secular attempts to curtail its autonomy. Lateran I – III, then, can be seen as part of a broader project led by a number of reforming Popes in the eleventh and twelfth century to assert the independence of the Church from the crown and tighten clerical discipline.  Read more

Please join us in praying for the repose of the soul of our brother John Baptist Watson OP, of our Newcastle community, who died on 5th January and was buried yesterday. Brother John Baptist was born in the North East in 1929, and, after joining the order as young man (being professed on 30th December 1951), he served as a lay (cooperator) brother in various priories, later being ordained to the permanent diaconate, which he exercised in Newcastle for many years. His health declined in recent years, and he moved into a nursing home near the priory, where he received something of a new lease of life ministering to his fellow residents and, for example, leading them in praying the Rosary. After a short illness, he died in the Newcastle Infirmary, having received the Sacraments from his Superior. Read more

This council was centred around whether Photius ought, or ought not, to be Patriarch of Constantinople.  It involved clear political interactions and, what is more, the political situation was complex, and changed significantly over short periods of time. An interaction with actual ‘secular’ politics and civic life is a feature of many of the ecumenical councils. An awareness of political factors is probably common to them all. After all, the Church exists in and interacts with the world. In common with other councils, it passed canons that have proved important over time, and often of more significance and use in theology, than the central business for which such councils were principally called. Read more

Readers in striking distance of Oxford are warmly invited to join us for a series of talks exploring some of the challenging questions that non-believers sometimes put to people of faith. The talks - which will be given by a number of Dominicans, including Godzdogz's own Br Andrew Brookes - are free, and will take place on six consecutive Tuesdays at 8pm, starting on February 5th. The evenings will include an opportunity for open discussion and questions (as well as some refreshments: Dominicans believe in feeding mind and body!). Read more

Canterbury is in some ways the religious heart of England. That was certainly the case when the first Dominican friars arrived on these shores in 1221, the year of St Dominic's death. Yet they did not stay to found their first priory in the city of Augustine, Anselm and Thomas à Becket. They preached before Archbishop Stephen Langton, then made haste to London, the political capital. Again they moved on and did not stop until they came to Oxford, the (then) intellectual capital. Right from the start, we Dominicans have always been attracted to university centres, where our commitment to study and preaching can bear great fruit. Read more