On November 12, faculty member Dr. Marga Vega presented “The Ontology of Art: An Anthropological Perspective” as this year’s Aquinas Lecture. Her lecture addressed questions like, “What constitutes something as a work of art?” and “Why do experiences like a sunset or Yosemite park produce aesthetic admiration without being considered works of art?” Drawing from the main theories of defining art (institutionalism, functionalism, and the cluster concept approach) and philosophers like Aquinas, Kant, and J. Searle, Vega stated that every work of art possess the logical features of social objects, a status function that we collectively assign. In the case of art, this status function consists in investing the work of art with a further status, personification. In this way, we give the work of art the status of a pseudo-person that deserves respect and must be preserved.
The Second Edition of The Unchanging God of Love by Fr. Michael Dodds, OP is now available from the Catholic University of America Press. Much contemporary debate surrounds the traditional teaching that God is unchanging. It is frequently argued that an immutable God must be cold, remote, indifferent, and uncaring – that an unchanging God cannot be the triune God of love revealed in Scripture. This text provides a clear and comprehensive account of what Aquinas says about divine immutability, presented in a way that allows his theology to address contemporary criticism. Aquinas’s unchanging God proves to be no static deity, but the dynamic, Trinitarian plenitude of knowledge, love, and life, to whom not only immutability but also motion may in some way be attributed. Through this study, it becomes clear that the unchanging God of Aquinas, far from being different or remote, is truly the God of compassion and love revealed in Scripture, who shares a most intimate friendship with the people he has created and redeemed.
