After Artificial Intelligence, St. Francis: Fadi Chehadé and the Spirit of Prayer and Devotion

We are waiting, not for Godot, but for a new, and doubtless very different, St. Antony of Padua.

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Fadi Chehadé: AI and Peacebuilding

I was glad to be present this last weekend when Fadi Chehadé gave his keynote address at the Focolare Movement’s Hearth for the Human Family which was hosted by Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. Chehadé’s topic was “Peacebuilding in the Age of Rapid Digital Advancement: Can We Keep Up?”

Without trying to summarize the whole immense worth of Chehadé’s talk, I’d like to touch on a couple key moments in it. Considered through the lens of St. Francis of Assisi’s famous letter to Antony of Padua, these touchstones bring out certain aspects of a wise educational and Christian formational paradigm for moving into the future in our lately AI-transformed context. While this view’s Franciscan and Chiara Lubich/Focolare accents ring audibly, this is yet one which this author thinks has some universal value (as audacious as that is to say) despite, or because of, its humble simplicity and provinciality.

First touchstone: Chehadé at one moment presented a picture of the hierarchical supervention of newer computer capacities over older ones: decades ago the buzzword was “data,” then it was “information.” The access to information through search engines is predicated on the availability of data, but it is a higher and supervening operation. Chehade thinks that AI and the algorithms are now giving us something more like knowledge, with capacities akin to logical and reasoning capacities. This capacity supervenes over the information capacities in something like the way those information capacities supervene over the earlier foundational data capacities. 

My own brief gloss on this would be to say that: AI prosthetically extends human logical and discursive reasoning capacity in something like the way physical books, physical libraries, and the Google search engine prosthetically extend human capacity for memory.

Yet, and here we come to the second touchstone I’d like to use from Chehadé’s talk: these reasoning, logical, knowledge capacities Chehadé identifies in AI do not equate to or pass over into wisdom. Interacting heavily with AI in his work, Chehadé is decidedly not among those who believe that these machines are sentient or that they can cross over into the space of wisdom. His call was for humans – who do have the capacity for agency, genuine wisdom, and spiritual maturity – to accept and use these new tools, which are so disruptive in so many ways (and in particular ways for education), with good motivations, and wisdom, and for the common good.

Chehadé shared a powerful anecdote that vividly brings out the import of this second touchstone. Chehadé’s company arranged for him to eat dinner with an AI-generated Nelson Mandela. Visually and in terms of knowledge, the AI Mandela was extraordinarily impressive. It looked and spoke like Mandela, and deftly engaged in conversation with an expert deployment of Nelson’s thought, speaking, writing, and the history in which he was involved. Not only that: AI Mandela knew about and could apply its way of thinking to current events as well: Chehadé asked it about prospects for peace in Gaza today, and it knew all about Gaza. 

Yet, when Chehadé was asked about the impact of AI Mandela, and the worth of the tool for peace in Gaza today, Chehadé’s response was clear and unequivocal. AI Mandela was not the personal presence of Nelson Mandela. Chehadé had not had dinner or conversed with the man who so powerfully worked for peace in South Africa. The great president and witness was not at dinner. AI Mandela lacked wisdom.


After AI: St. Francis and the Spirit of Prayer and Devotion

Let’s bring into our reflections St. Francis’s oft-cited, or fated, letter to St. Antony of Padua, an early Franciscan of considerable theological gifting. 

I, Brother Francis, send greetings to you, Brother Anthony, my theological superior. I am pleased that you are now teaching sacred theology to our brothers providing one thing: As it says in our Rule, please see that you do not squelch the spirit of prayer and devotion in them as they undertake studies of this kind.*

This rule might be called “fated” because it warrants theological study, which accelerates difficult-to-bear tensions within the Franciscan order. And yet, St. Francis’ note seems to mean, just as surely, that theological study is not anathema for true followers of St. Francis – so long as “the spirit of prayer and devotion” is not squelched in those engaging such study.

St. Francis is surely not wrong to worry. St. Francis is concerned that the access to certain forms of textual power (as we can say post Foucault, without being blind to the limits of such a rendering**) might diminish the imperative to pray and do good. The worldliness and privilege of education and books have their allure, early and late – as does the promise of power and prestige to be garnered by harnessing AI in our own day. When books are a higher priority than lepers, knowledge and abstract essences displace persons and particulars as the existential path of discipleship. 

Hugh of St. Victor had worried similarly in the previous century. In his Didascalicon, a text written to teach Hugh’s way of reading in all the arts and disciplines as a way of transformation in divine Wisdom, Hugh writes:

It is necessary that the student beginning to advance along this road [to the heavenly homeland] learn in the books he reads not only to be inspired by the outward appearance of their literary expression but also by the imitation of their virtues, so that he might take pleasure not so much in the dignity or arrangement of words as in the beauty of truth. Such a student should also know that it is not conducive to his object that, seized and carried away by an inane desire for knowledge, he should carefully inquire into obscure and profound writings in which his mind is more preoccupied than edified, lest reading alone hold him in such bondage that he is entirely prevented for performing good works (Didascalicon 5.7).

Much like St. Francis will warn that certain kinds of study can squelch the spirit of prayer and devotion, so Hugh here warns against two dangers of study: that one’s mind be caught up merely in the external aesthetics of stylish writing and fail to imitate the virtues depicted; and that one might become preoccupied in speculative mental games and so cease doing good works. Hugh notably associates “the beauty of truth” with the actual performance of good works, active love, kindness in a rich and thick sense. 

For Hugh as for other Victorine & Franciscan luminaries, authentic wisdom, whether in God or in creatures, is fully realized only when and because (as is always the case in God) it inclines to the doing of good. 

This Victorine-Franciscan sensibility with a pedigree including both Hugh of St. Victor and St. Francis comes into play in the early Franciscans’ definition of theology itself. According to the Summa Halensis, the foundational summa for Parisian and especially Franciscan theological culture composed in Paris mainly from the mid 1230s to the mid 1240s, theology “perfects the soul by way of affection, moving it toward the good through the principles of fear and love” and is hence appropriately called “wisdom.”*** St. Bonaventure and others will continue to defend this Victorine and Franciscan view that the study of theology, which itself should flow from and be imbued with a spirit of prayer and devotion, grows the soul in wisdom and leads one to the actual doing of good, and to becoming good.

The Victorine-Franciscan tradition’s ways of understanding the spiritual and affective dimensions of theological study offer us apt insight in our present moment, in which Fadi Chehadé argues that AI can bear good fruit when employed wisely, for good ends. How much then should AI be embraced and employed by those formed by ongoing immersion in the spirit of prayer and devotion? St. Francis’ exhortation to St. Antony rings in our time more loudly than ever, for the tool of AI is more powerful than the alluring textual tools of Francis’ time.  

What about the use of AI in the discipline of theology itself? Theology, as the early Franciscans saw it, is wisdom properly speaking, in a way other disciplines may not be. Will the use of AI tools subvert or thwart the theologians’ becoming good and wise? It need not, it seems to me, if the wisdom of Hugh and St. Francis is seriously heeded. I am not suggesting that theologians neglect learning to speak and write and reason for themselves, as undergraduates may be tempted to do. Yet various of the scholarly functions in which theologians engage may be aided by the power of a reasoning assistant. AI is a prosthetic extension of one’s intellectual agency, but the wisdom must be supplied by the theologian – as must the actual good works which are the goal of discursive study in the first place.

Might we think of AI as a reasoning assistant – a handmaid, if you will, in something like the way the medieval Christian scholastics in the 13th century spoke of philosophy being theology’s handmaid? I have to say that I am not in love with this idea, but it bears meditation. The way in which philosophy was hashed out and commonly defined as theology’s “handmaid” was in vogue at the same time in which scholastics in Paris were grappling with and assimilating the fuller collection of Aristotle’s works, which are nothing if not tools for increasing one’s reasoning capacity. Perhaps the thought that AI tools may function in a somehow analogous way is not too wide of the mark. But the understanding of AI as a prosthetic extension of the intellect’s reasoning capacities seems to me both more accurate and more necessary to say. 

In closing, St. Francis’ emphasis on prayer and devotion as the imbuing principle of theology, and Hugh and the Summa Halensis’ understandings of theology as the cultivation of divine wisdom teleologically ordered to the doing of good, should be underscored as we think of our work with AI. There will be a greater temptation than ever to merely exult in logical virtuosity and hyperproduction of content (at which AI will dominate). Theologians need to embrace the charge given by St. Antony of Padua and the wise guidance of Hugh of St. Victor in order to cultivate themselves and others as persons of heroic moral worth and courage. It requires personal presence and decisive action governed by wisdom for Nelson Mandela to be a person of peace in South Africa, and for St. Francis to sigh for ecstatic peace and preach the gospel to the Sultan.  

It is only such a person, and no machine, who is able in the words of Chiara Lubich to “be the first to love.”



* Jon M. Sweeney, The Complete St. Francis: His Life, The Complete Writings, and the Little Flowers, 236. 

** As has been well noted, the limits of Foucault’s genealogical power analyses are identical to their glory in their limited sphere: it studies power, more and less indiscreetly. Victorine-Franciscan thinkers will recognize that power is only the first transcendental in a triad which culminates in the kindness (benignitas) or goodness (bonitas) or love (caritas) toward which power is, when rightly ordered, always ordered, e.g., the Victorine power-wisdom-kindness or Bonaventure’s power-wisdom-goodness triads. And this all entails at least two things: First, that the truest, deepest and most enduring power is active existing goodness: the sacrificial kindness that is love-in-act, the work of the resurrection in our lives. Second, a power analysis can always be refined – integrated within Wisdom – even as it is itself differentiated on the basis of kindness-love and re-ordered toward the same.

*** A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis, 57.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White on Thomism and Victorine-Franciscan Theological Revival

“[W]e could be helped by some revival of the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, to be sure.”

That’s the viewpoint of the noted Thomistic theologian and philosopher, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. White says it would be good for the Church for there to be, not just further Thomistic revival (though he is certainly in favor of that), but revival of the Victorine-Franciscan theological and spiritual tradition.

White’s welcome Victorine & Franciscan theological advocacy comes in an interview in First Things by Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., on the occasion of the publication of White’s Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 2: On the Rational Credibility of Christianity.

I’ve long been grateful for, and instructed by, Fr. White’s work, and I’d like to offer a few comments by way of concord and response. The context in which Fr. White makes this remark is adequately communicated by two questions of the interview:

Sam Zeno Conedera: Your writings are firmly grounded in Thomism while simultaneously engaging with a wide variety of religious traditions and philosophical trends. In what way does your work contribute to the progress of the Thomistic tradition of inquiry?

Thomas Joseph White: Thomism is grounded in a set of principles—those found in St. Thomas himself, many of which he draws from the Scriptures and Fathers, as well as classical philosophers such as Aristotle. Aquinas’s articulation and coordination of these principles leads to great insights about the nature of reality, both natural and supernatural, human and divine. There are many things he does not consider, but insights from more recent philosophy, theology, modern science, and natural history can be understood or placed in relation to the principles of this thought in ways that are convergent and mutually beneficial to each other. The aim in the end is not to follow any particular thinker but to understand the nature of reality, and Aquinas, doctor communis, is very helpful for this, though by no means alone in the project. No one is alone in the search for truth, and solitary projects always fail in the end.

SZC: Other great theological schools of thought (Bonaventurian, Scotist, Suarezian, etc.), which in the past have been partners in theological dialogue, have not experienced the revival that Thomism has undergone in recent decades. What advantages and disadvantages does this present for Thomists?

TJW: I think there are three things to note here: First, the re-discovery of Aquinas in our own time has also led to new interest in other scholastics, such as those you mention, as well as more recent figures, such as Matthias Scheeben and Charles Journet. So renewed interest in St. Thomas is probably beneficial for the recovery of other traditions.

Second, those who study Aquinas or promote some form of “Thomism” inevitably benefit from learned interlocutors and loyal critics of other traditions and schools of thought. There is a lot of convergence between Aquinas and Bonaventure, not quite as much between Aquinas and Scotus, though some. But in either case, the comparisons are illuminating and challenge us to think again about what we believe to be true about reality. That is precious and needed in the Church, so we could be helped by some revival of the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, to be sure.

Third, and cutting back a little against the grain of the last remark, there is something in the intellectual life akin to biological life. The healthier variants tend to preserve life and persevere over time. Better scientific theories gain traction because they afford a better window into the truth about material reality. St. Thomas has staying power and his principles exhibit vital growth (what Newman called “chronic vigor”) because his work is rife with insight, at once philosophical, theological, and mystical. This fruitfulness is something we can take forward into new conversations, with other major religious traditions, with contemporary naturalists, with alternative philosophical claims about human nature. That is something I try to undertake in this book.

First, I’d like to concur and underscore how absolutely true it is that Thomism hasn’t existed in a vacuum. It has had dialogue partners since the beginning, and they were early and late often conspicuously Franciscan, or even Victorine-Franciscan (if one accepts the argument of the title of this website). The very order and structure of Thomas’ Summa shows that he is thinking about the order and structure of the earlier Franciscan Summa of Theology, the Summa Halensis, and he’s making critical decisions about what to put where, what to include and not include, in addition to directly substantive decisions about his own positions in dialogue with the Franciscan ones.

And, when it comes to Summas, the Summa Halensis has it all! To study it and reflect on it as a (Franciscan) scholastic pedagogy (as Justin Coyle sagely regards it) is also to come to appreciate the breadth of the conversations happening among Friars at Paris. It gives a more fully orbed picture than one is able to have from studying, say, Aquinas’ Summa in isolation. Thomas is also, of course, thinking about and responding to positions found in Bonaventure’s Sentences commentaries.

And to take this point further, the key thing isn’t just to understand how Thomas himself is indebted to theological dialogue with Franciscans. This is just as clearly the case in subsequent Thomistic tradition. Thomists and Bonaventurians and Scotists (and Bonaventurian Scotists!) are always dialoguing with each other. Of course, Blessed John Duns Scotus was able to respond to Thomas’ concerns and positions in his own writings, since he wrote a bit later, and so he’s taking into account the moves of Thomas and other intervening figures. But the Thomists learn from Scotus and Scotists, and develop Thomism more fully and precisely on the basis of it, and in dialogue and disputation with it. One anecdote will suffice: when I first started studying Scotus on natural theology, I realized that I had already run into some of his argumentative forms and moves — in latter day Thomistic authors! So to grapple with and learn to think with even the Thomistic tradition, one must learn to appreciate what the Franciscans have been up to.

Second, Fr. White makes a valuable point in the sentence leading up to his commendation of the Victorines & Franciscans. He says that “the comparisons are illuminating and challenge us to think again about what we believe to be true about reality. That is precious and needed in the Church, so we could be helped by some revival of the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, to be sure.”

Amen.

When many people start to get into Catholic theology and philosophy, they gravitate (and sometimes gravitate very hard indeed) toward St. Thomas. And the reasons for this are obvious and not bad at all: he’s called “common doctor,” and there are many gifted expositors of his thought and extenders of his perspective. Fr. White is excellent in both those ways. These and many others are good reasons to take Aquinas seriously. It is great to be, not a nihilist, but a hillbilly Thomist! Yet to think about God and reality in conversation with, say, both Aquinas and Bonaventure, here another level of richness is possible, as we think about the different ways in which often shared principles and received patristic views are held, applied, and used. Or for another example, it is often noticed that the way intellect and will relate feels to most interpreters quite different in Aquinas and Scotus. There are manifold subtleties in how one brings that out and appraises it. But the differences in perspective that seem to arise as a result are not shallow: they’re stunning. Each side has polemical takes on the other’s way of seeing it. But it is excellent to be able to see that both of these ways of seeing it have been embraced by very many thinkers — not just Aquinas and Scotus but those after each of them. Both paths result in, profoundly different, utterly Christian & Catholic ways of seeing. (Or at least apparently and arguably so — until or unless the disagreement is clarified by the magisterium, the eschaton, or an online apologist who finds the difference intolerable.)

But instead of advocating for a Thomism-in-an-echo-chamber, White affirms the value in such deep probing and considered reflection on fundamental philosophical questions and perspectives: such is “precious and needed in the Church”: such makes for better, deeper, more considered Thomists, and better, deeper, more considered Scotists.

Three cheers for that.

Third, I’d like to reflect a bit on Fr. White’s third point, which he says is “cutting back a little against the grain” of his second remark, which he’s just concluded by advocating for Victorine & Franciscan revival.

He says, “The healthier variants tend to preserve life and persevere over time. Better scientific theories gain traction because they afford a better window into the truth about material reality. St. Thomas has staying power and his principles exhibit vital growth (what Newman called “chronic vigor”) because his work is rife with insight, at once philosophical, theological, and mystical. This fruitfulness is something we can take forward into new conversations….”

It is certainly the case that St. Thomas’ work has staying power, and the kinds of insight that Fr. White says. And to an extent the import of this remark is that Thomism, just as it isn’t healthy when locked into its own echo chamber, also shouldn’t be locked into an echo chamber in which only Victorines & Franciscans & Thomists are present: it should engage present, current, new interlocutors outside its old dialogue partners and haunts. Agreed. But is Fr. White also contrasting Thomism to the Victorine-Franciscan tradition in this remark? I don’t know. [Update: Dear Reader, please see the added footnote * below, which clarifies that Fr. White is not aiming at the Franciscans.] But I’ll proceed a bit further on the supposition that some Thomist somewhere might do so: some imagined Thomistic partisan might take the vigor of, say, the Eastern Province Dominicans and the Thomistic ressourcement underway in recent decades as positive sign that Thomism has a kind of Newmanian chronic vigor, in contrast to (let us say) Franciscan approaches, because of the evolutionary advantage (as it were) of its truthfulness: Dominicans bury their opponents (while saying the funeral prayers of course, pace Darwin).

In response to such an interlocutor, it is worth noting that Thomism and the Franciscan schools have both suffered their intellectual collapses now and again. There are times in the memory of the old folks when there wasn’t an avid Thomistic ressourcement underway, and when such an imagined Thomistic partisan’s remark wouldn’t have had much purchase on the appearance of truth. And, gosh, let us just say: the times of Franciscan missionary and theological excellence are not small times in history. And if a Thomistic partisan might complain that the wrong kind of Franciscan theology sometimes gains sway in Franciscan circles, well, too, there have been times when the wrong kind of Thomism held sway (and once a patristic ressourcement resulted in response, and got control of an ecumenical council).

For my part, I am grateful for the Thomistic ressourcement underway through theologians like Fr. White and Dr. Levering and my own first Aquinas seminar teacher, Dr. Reinhard Huetter: what a robust and beautiful clarity of thought one gains from learning to think with the common doctor, to catch glimpses of what he saw.

And it is worth recalling that one of the properly intellectual and scholastic reasons for the ongoing worth of reading Thomas Aquinas — and as a Victorine-Franciscan thinker I share Fr. White’s gratitude to not be in a single-tradition-echo-chamber — is that Thomas’ Summa is a marvelous teaching text. Even non-Thomistic theologians need to begin to gain the skills of scholastic rigor from someone, and who better. Aquinas’ Summa is much more streamlined in organization and argument than the overflowing and overgrowing fecundity of the Franciscan Summa Halensis: but the Church and the world need the seeds of growth from the Summa Halensis too (and I suspect now more than ever)! And Aquinas’ Summa operates at an easier level of argument than, say, Scotus’ Ordinatio, and I’m very glad to have encountered Aquinas first. But I’m also very glad to have encountered Scotus eventually! — and I’m quite confident the Church is poorer where Scotus’ perspective doesn’t exist.

In closing, I’d like to encourage those who study theology — and in particular those who are drawn to the conversations around Aquinas — to both enrich themselves by getting their heads around the Victorine-Franciscan theological tradition, and to consider it as a theological school of spiritual and vocational worth in its own right.

You can read the good interview with Fr. White in its entirety here.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/04/recovering-our-christian-intellectual-tradition

In the meantime, just remember, that a leading Thomistic theologian just called for a Victorine & Franciscan theological revival.

* Fr. Thomas Joseph White, in kind correspondence, confirms that he’s not aiming at the Franciscans in his third point, and underscores that he wishes Alexander of Hales and St. Bonaventure were more central in contemporary theology, and expresses admiration for Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity in particular. Thanks Fr. White!

For Making Victorine & Franciscan Sources and Voices Available

Resources promoting the Thomistic intellectual tradition are widely available — if there was ever an uncontroversial thesis, in this information age, in the overlapping worlds of Theology and Catholicism it is surely this.

And, I am happy to lend my voice in support of the thought that the availability of Thomism is a good thing. I have watched its increase. Having come to theological awareness, first, in the somewhat sanctified halls of Duke University Divinity School from 2004-7, I can attest that the potent mezclas of Aquinas and Barth shaping the sensibilities of my various professors were, surely, a vibrant and good thing. Most of these professors assigning Aquinas were Yale-school Methodists — Stanley Hauerwas and Amy Laura Hall and J. Warren Smith significant among them — and my first Aquinas seminar was taught by Reinhard Huetter, a Lutheran who was received into the Roman Catholic Church during my time in the M.Div. program. As a Methodist seminarian, then, I experienced firsthand the way in which the new Thomistic ressourcement was a good thing. I came to love Aquinas under the tutelage of these people. When I first encountered the works of Fr. Thomas Joseph White and Matthew Levering, I was both instructed by them and grateful for what they were doing, and that is still the case.

The years since I’ve graduated from Duke have only seen an increase in the availability of Thomistic texts and voices: the English and the Latin of Aquinas’ ST are both available in convenient forms without the mediation of any paywall, as are legion voices capable of competently teaching both Thomas and more developed and nuanced Thomistic positions. These range from the highest levels of erudite academic theology to the most popular, and span media from text to video to all the multivarious organs of social media: Pope Leo XIII’s strong recommendation of St. Thomas in Aeterni Patris has surely been heeded in significant ways in this information age.

And yet the Thomistic tradition does not contain, alone, the sum total of Christian faith nor of theology nor of philosophy.

Alongside St. Thomas — even in Aeterni Patris (par. 14) — stands the Franciscan Intellectual tradition represented by its seraphic doctor St. Bonaventure.

As a scholar of, and enthusiast for, the Victorine-Franciscan theological stream, I cannot help but note that it boasts little of the same wide availability of publicly accessible, high quality, no-paywall English texts. That this is the case seems to me to the direct detriment to the spread of this tradition. And it seems like an obstacle which can be surmounted.

The situation is also surely ironic. That the intellectual & spiritual tradition of the poverello should, in the information age, prove difficult to access, even in terms of major texts of the most significant figures — figures of incalculable influence in at once the theological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of the Church and the world — cannot help but occasion remark. Does this intellectual tradition earnestly intend its own continuation and spread? Is it content to exist in diminishing form in fewer and fewer academic halls?

What are needed are more theologians and friars and priests and religious sisters and brothers willing to speak and teach their Victorine-Franciscan perspectives at a variety of intellectual levels, and scholars being willing to share even “good enough” versions of their translations of key Victorine and Franciscan works without the intervention of any paywall or purchase.

In short, what is needed are for the basic texts to be freely available in English, and for a body of teaching and commentary and scholarship and reflection to grow up around them.

Happily, in this regard, those who would learn from the wisdom of the Early Franciscans have received a substantial gift in Schumacher and Bychkov’s translations of a narrow but important selection of texts from the Summa Halensis, which Fordham is giving away for FREE (yes, selling them online for $0) in eBook edition. The Summa Halensis is, among other important things, the foundational textual pedagogy of Franciscan theological culture, arising from the first generation of Franciscan academics at the University of Paris gathered around “doctor irrefragibilis,” Alexander of Hales, teacher of St. Bonaventure.

A further gift, and not to be overlooked, is that Peter Simpson has made available his translations of Bl. John Duns Scotus’ Ordinatio, among other significant works. Thank you Professor Simpson!

Despite such remarkable gifts, much remains to be done to make the riches of the Victorine-Franciscan tradition available, to bring them to bear in ways that contribute to Christian intellectual and spiritual flourishing, to the fullest.

Hopefully this blog and resource site can contribute to all this in some small ways.

— Pax et bonum —

Boyd Taylor Coolman on the Victorine-Franciscan Theological Stream

Is Victorine-Franciscan theology even a sensible thing to say? What do the Franciscans have to do with the Victorines? Questions like these may reasonably be elicited by the title Victorine-Franciscan Theology.

This conversation with Boyd Taylor Coolman puts the key pieces in place for seeing the connection and deep continuity between Victorine and Early Franciscan theology, and even wonderfully traces out important trajectories in Franciscan theology’s development into Scotus and Scotism. Coolman was my dissertation director at Boston College, and he’s an excellent theologian and teacher — as is also clear from this video. Three cheers for interviewer Max Montana and his channel Philosophy for Theology for interviewing an important scholar on topics and figures which are, for all their massive significance in the history of the Church and continued spiritual and theological life and relevance today, yet woefully underappreciated.

Enjoy!

PEACE! GOOD! and a Victorine-Franciscan Theology blog

Pax et bonum — PEACE and GOOD.

Those words have encouraged and inspired me since I first began to hear and read them in associations with St. Francis and scholars working in Franciscan theological studies. They seem the most fitting ones with which to begin this blog.

There will be a lot added here in coming weeks and months, I hope and intend — posts and podcasts and videos, readings of papers, quotations, interviews and conversations, and theological thoughts still being shaped and sharpened (and doubtless much in need of critique).

I hope you might find something here that’s valuable for your own spiritual journey and your own intellectual life. Welcome.

And for now, and always — pax et bonum!