Greg Heille, O.P., his cousin and her son: taking energy from an old growth tree in the forests of North Carolina On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, I attended the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer at St Dominic Priory here in St Louis. Each year I am drawn into Frank Quinn’s beautiful antiphons for Holy Week, and each year there are some difficult antiphons that neither the cantors nor the assembly get quite right. In daily choral prayer, we miss notes and make mistakes and (now that Frank is in his grave) nobody really seems to mind: we simply press on. Th... [Read More...]

Carol F. Williams Carol Williams is a retired physician who has studied at Aquinas Institute since 1998. Forty years’ experience delivering health care to women and young girls impresses one with how frequently intimate violence is a part of their lives.  The statistics are impressive:  one in six American women has experienced rape or attempted rape; nine of ten rape victims are female.  Fifteen per cent of sexual assault victims are under age twelve. (RAINN)   While physical assault that causes severe enough injury to bring a woman or child to medical a... [Read More...]

Carla Mae Streeter, OP Aquinas Institute of Theology From the Interdisciplinary Conference Collective Memory in St. Louis: Recollection, Forgetting and the Common Good, “Memory and the Religious Imagination” Fontbonne University and the St. Louis History Museum October 21-23, 2010 Shaping an Adequate Human Anthropology What is imagination? If we are to answer this question, it will be helpful to provide an adequate human anthropology as a context for our answer. The popular trilogy is body, mind, and spirit. But is this adequate? Where are the emotions in such a triad? Are they in... [Read More...]

Two disparate cases have more in common than we might think Charles E. Bouchard, O.P. and Richard Peddicord, O.P. At first glance the death of an unborn child at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix and the death of convicted criminal Ronnie Lee Gardner in Draper, Utah, appear to have little in common. Yet analysis shows that both of them are governed by the Church’s teaching on the direct taking of innocent human life, by the technical but widely used principle of double effect, and by the principle of moral cooperation. It is not clear that these principles were applied equally in... [Read More...]