November promises to be a busy month as many of our faculty members attend the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. This year, our very own Barbara Green, OP will be delivering two papers at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Boston. The first, titled “Marriage Counseling in Jeremiah 2-9: Human and Divine Spouses, Prophetic Therapist, Reading Interns,” makes use of Bakhtinian dialogic and utterance strategies to explore new ways of understanding Jeremiah. The second, “Cognitive Linguistics and the Idolatry-Is-Adultery Metaphor,” will use the strategies of cognitive linguistics to discover fresh insights and suggest how this metaphor in biblical texts can be used to disclose valuable information about God and us.
Last month, Fr. Anselm Ramelow, OP gave a talk titled, “When Reason Seeks Understanding,” at a symposium on “Faith and Reason in Christianity and Islam” at the University of Washington in Seattle. His talk looked at what appears to be a rejection of classical models of rationality (from Christian theology and philosophy) by modern science, making it difficult for modern science to have a rational dialogue with the Muslim world. He further discussed how the rationality of modern science is rooted in late medieval nominalism and how, instead, classical Christian theology and philosophy, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, would be able to engage both the Muslim world and modern science.
Fr. Bryan Kromholtz, OP, who joined our Theology faculty this fall, just returned from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, titled On the Last Day: The Time of the Resurrection of the Dead According to Thomas Aquinas. Fr. Bryan’s work shows how the promise of the resurrection in the Angelic Doctor’s work has important implications for our faith in Christ (who will raise us), for our life as a Church (which is the community with whom we will be raised) and our place in the cosmos (which will be renewed when we are raised). The dissertation was accepted with the distinction insigni cum laude. His committee included Fr. Richard Schenk, OP, who was invited to sit on the committee for his expertise in medieval and contemporary eschatology, and Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP, a former faculty member of DSPT.
DSPT alumna, Elissa McCormack, recently published an article titled “Inclusivism in the Fiction of C.S. Lewis: The Case of Emeth” in the Fall 2008 issue of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. Her article is inspired by the scene at the end of The Last Battle where Emeth, a Calormene who had always worshipped the god Tash, finds himself faced with Aslan in the New Narnia. The salvation granted to this character raises questions about C.S. Lewis’s beliefs surrounding the possibility of salvation in non-Christian religions. Her article examines this thread in C.S. Lewis’s fiction, including the Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and Till We Have Faces, concluding that, for Lewis, it is not holding a correct belief that is ultimately necessary for salvation, but rather committing your life to a constant and sincere search for Truth.
