I am grateful to all the participants for their thoughtful comments on my book and to Hans Madueme for inviting me to participate in this symposium. Response to Jennifer Frey I appreciate Jennifer Frey’s careful summary of the main themes of the book, especially her emphasis on the distinction between univocal and analogical causality. Her…

Michael Dodds’s Unlocking Divine Action is an impressive and deeply learned attempt to deepen conversation about the relationship between divine action and scientific understanding of the natural world. Dodds claims, quite reasonably, (1) that important ways of understanding action and causation were lost in the transition from Aristotelian/Thomistic thought to what he calls “Newtonian science,”…

Michael Dodds’s proposal for understanding divine action is fundamentally analogical. It is based on an understanding of ex nihilo creation that also can only be expressed analogically. Because there are different orders or levels of reality, our language of creation in general and causation in particular must be able to stretch across such levels. Whether…

I am grateful for the opportunity to read and comment on Fr. Michael J. Dodds’s excellent work, Unlocking Divine Action. In the interest of space, I have been asked to confine my remarks to one or two areas of divine action discussed by Fr. Dodds. I have chosen, therefore, to focus on his use of…

While the stated topic of the book is divine action, the subtitle does a lot of work: Contemporary Science & Thomas Aquinas. Dodds believes that modern views of causality are impoverished, and that Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics provides the remedy. While this is doubtful in my opinion, the mapping of medieval concepts to contemporary science should be…

When we speak about action and agency, we inevitably avail ourselves of causal concepts—of agents moving in order to bring about changes in the world: Gianna gives the book to Sebastian, Dominic pours milk into his bowl, Thomas walks to school, and so on. Our concept of cause is deployed anytime we seek to explain…

At any given time of year, it’s not difficult to find two or three used pianos listed for free in local online marketplaces. The catch, of course, is that you have to go and pick up the piano yourself. As an amateur furniture restoration enthusiast, this stuck me as an opportunity too good to pass…

In answering this missional and practical question, after a sampling of supernatural experiences, I would propose the following two main explanations. This list is based on my own missionary experience, observations, and research. A Sampling of Experiences of Supernatural Power This section showcases empirical supernatural experiences in the non-Western world. Historical records attest that in…

A number of years ago at a conference in Hamburg, Germany, a European theologian asked me a question after my presentation on African Pentecostalism and World Christianity: “Why do your people [Africans] spend so much time praying about everything?” My answer was simple: “unlike you, when we pray ‘give us this day our daily bread,’…

Christians understand God to work in various ways. God created and sustains the universe, an ordered universe. The fact that gravity works in consistent, rather than capricious, ways is God’s good gift. As with sunshine and rain (Mt. 5:45), gravity is given through providence both to the just and unjust. When, through science, we study…

In this excerpt from his catechism for children, Catholic theologian Juan de Valdés (1509-1541) takes an expansive view of the spiritual disciplines. The whole of the Christian life, he argues, should be characterized by prayer and fellowship, in all things seeking reconciliation with the Lord by fasting from the lusts of the flesh and feasting…

Since the first edition of Peter Brown’s magisterial Augustine of Hippo: A Biography in 1967, interest in the life, work, and thought of Saint Augustine has exploded across Catholic and Protestant circles, and across large swaths of the university disciplines. This is a welcome revival, in my view, for at least three reasons. First, in…