Introduction: Nature in Theology
Fall-Winter 2019
Nature in Theology
The Descent of Man: On Evolution and the Devolution of Nature, History, and Truth
Michael Hanby“The apprehension of a frog or a muskrat, [. . .] is inseparable from the implicit identification of a good in whose light the functional parts are intelligible as parts.”
Physics without Physis: On Form and Teleology in Modern Science
Simon Oliver“[T]he metaphysical framework that rendered matter intelligible disintegrated and with it the notion of nature itself.”
“Biology Worthy of Life”: On the Work of Steven Talbott
Lesley Rice“The parts of an organism bear a kind of responsive creativity within the given auspices of the whole creature’s identity.”
“To Till It and Keep It”: Catholic Social Doctrine and Agroecology
Matthew Philipp Whelan“Learning to do well means learning to acknowledge what is given well.”
“The Sparkling of the Holy Ghost”: The Metaphysics of Nature and Grace in Dante’s Paradiso
Mary Taylor“Being’s face manifested in the smile has an ontological depth at the same time that it reveals personal, concrete love.”
Augusto Del Noce on Marx’s Abolition of Human Nature
Carlo Lancellotti“God is not denied on the basis of some newly acquired scientific knowledge or metaphysical argument; rather, God cannot exist, because if he existed man could not be free.”
Fluidity: Man, the Triune God, and the Eucharistic Christ
Angela Franks“Our fluidity is meant to be an imitation of the triune self-gift that subsists.”
The Emperor’s (New) New Clothes: The Logic of the New “Gender Ideology”
Margaret H. McCarthy“[T]o be sexual is to be the kind of being that owes its very existence to others. It is to be always already in relation to the opposite sex.”
Pathei Mathos: Rereading Aeschylus’s Oresteia
Paolo Prosperi“[T]he horrendous experience through which the gods make the young Orestes pass contains in reality a paradoxical gift of grace.”
Retrieving the Tradition
On Henry B. Veatch and “Natural Law and the ‘Is’-‘Ought’ Question”: A Brief Introduction
David S. Crawford“Just as art and the rules of skill must both employ human creativity and draw on nature, so too practical reason works with what is given and aims toward an excellence to which a nature is called.”
Natural Law and the “Is”-“Ought” Question: Queries to Finnis and Grisez
Henry B. Veatch“[T]he very ‘is’ of human nature already has its ‘ought’ contained within it.”
Providence and Imitation: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Aristotle’s Poetics
Thomas Prufer“The original is enriched, not distorted, by its image.”