The Thomistic Institute

Fr. Thomas Aquinas Pickett argues that "living your best priesthood" consists not in natural self-improvement but in the exercise of two infused virtues: charity, the friendship with God by which he communicates his beatitude to us and the fire of Christ's own priestly self-offering, and religion, the virtue of reverencing God and rendering him the worship that is his due.

This lecture was given on March 28th, 2026, at St. Albert Priory.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Fr. Thomas Aquinas Pickett is a son of Ellensburg, Washington and a member of the Western Dominican Province. Apart from running, board games, and coffee, he enjoys studying his namesake, St Thomas Aquinas. Having received his BA in Philosophy at Gonzaga University (where he was NOT a member of the basketball team), his MDiv and MA in theology from the DSPT, his STB from l’Institut Catholique de Toulouse, and his STL and STD from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, he is now a professor of theology at the DSPT, assigned to St Albert the Great Priory.

Keywords: Beatitude, Charity, Christ's Priesthood, Communicatio, Cultus, Justice, Religion, Reverence, Sanctifying Grace, Virtue

Prof. Bruce Marshall argues that the Mass is a truly propitiatory sacrifice in which Christ's once-for-all offering on the cross is made present (not repeated) and given into the hands of the Church to be offered by priest and people together, so that by their active participation, the lay faithful share in Christ's eternal priesthood and the work of our redemption.

This lecture was given on March 28th, 2026, at St. Albert's Priory.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Bruce D. Marshall is Lehman Professor of Christian Doctrine at Southern Methodist University, and in 2023 he held the Aquinas Chair in the Thomistic Institute at the Angelicum in Rome. He is the author of Trinity and Truth and Christology in Conflict, and at present he is completing a book entitled The Primacy of Christ: Faith, Reason, and the Cross. Marshall has written extensively on the doctrines of the Trinity, the person and redemptive work of Christ, the Eucharist, the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, and the relationship between faith and reason. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from Yale University, and is a past President of the Academy of Catholic Theology.

Keywords: Active Participation, Aquinas, Council Of Trent, Eucharistic Sacrifice, John Paul II, Once For All Sacrifice, Propitiatory Sacrifice, Sacrosanctum Concilium, The Offertory, Transubstantiation

Fr. Thomas Davenport corrects two misunderstandings of Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology — the caricature that Aquinas relies on an intuition of essences and the oversimplification that the agent intellect automatically abstracts universals from phantasms — by recovering Aquinas's notion of experimentum, an ordered, pre-universal knowledge produced by the cogitative power's active collatio of particular intentions stored in memory, which prepares the phantasm for abstraction and shows that all knowledge of nature begins in the interior senses.

This lecture was given on July 16th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P., is professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, where he teaches philosophy of nature and epistemology. He has written and spoken on the relationship of faith and science in a variety of venues, including being a main contributor to the Thomistic Evolution project. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2017 and is working on his second PhD in philosophy.

Keywords: Agent Intellect, Aquinas, Cogitative Power, Collatio, Experimentum, Interior Senses, Memory, Phantasm, Proper Accidents, Substantial Form

Prof. Ryan Miller offers an introductory overview of the foundational terminology of Thomistic philosophy of nature — potency and act, the four causes, per se versus per accidens, the categories of substance, accident, and relation, and nature versus instrument — illustrating each distinction with modern scientific analogies and everyday examples like the conductor, combustion, phonemes, ionization, model species.

This lecture was given on July 16th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Professor Ryan Miller is Core Fellow at the University of St Thomas in Houston and formerly Swiss National Science Foundation Doc.CH Fellow at the University of Geneva, working on Aristotelian approaches to the metaphysics of emergence in physical and computational systems.

Keywords: Aquinas, Aristotle, Four Causes, Instrument, Nature, Per Accidens, Per Se, Potency and Act, Relation, Substance

Fr. Thomas Davenport argues against the Thomist intuition that artifice obscures nature, showing from Aquinas's account of art and artifacts that artificial forms are accidental forms rooted in the natural active and passive powers of substances, so that scientific instruments and experiments reveal rather than distort the natures they investigate.

This lecture was given on July 18th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P., is professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, where he teaches philosophy of nature and epistemology. He has written and spoken on the relationship of faith and science in a variety of venues, including being a main contributor to the Thomistic Evolution project. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2017 and is working on his second PhD in philosophy.

Keywords: Active and Passive Powers, Anjan Chakravarthy, Aquinas, Artificial Form, Assisting Cause, Causal Properties, Nancy Cartwright, Nomological Machine, Scientific Instruments, Semi-Realism