Angela Franks | St. John's Seminary (original) (raw)

Papers by Angela Franks

The New Ressourcement, 2024

In a speech to the Goethestiftung the year before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar thanked Goeth... more In a speech to the Goethestiftung the year before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar thanked Goethe for a key insight: that intellectual work should strive for "seeing, evaluating, and interpreting a figure" (or Gestalt) in a "synthetic look." 1 This Goethe-inspired synthetic contemplation was, he said, so attractive because it counteracted his experience of theological learning under neo-Scholastic manuals. The manual divided up the mystery of God into separate treatises; Christology was presented as "a particularly thorny hedge," a mass of heresies to avoid. It was, he said, "a quantity of materials, but it was not possible to discover any form" to the theological construction. 2 While manuals have long fallen from favor, Balthasar's complaint of disciplinary formlessness is as contemporary as ever. The past obsession with heresy-criticism has given way to other trends, but then, as now, a positive vision of the form of theology is missing. Within the academy, this problem is not confined to theology. As Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, the modern university is better called a "multiversity," each

Thomist, Apr 1, 2023

Synodality can be a movement that deserves a theology. I will argue that synodality points to the... more Synodality can be a movement that deserves a theology. I will argue that synodality points to the Way who is Christ (syn-hodos as a meeting of the way) and can be
conceived in terms of the dynamics of ecclesial communio, itself a theological transposition of the one-many question. Understood this way, synodality expresses a symphony of pneumatic charisms and missions discerned within the Church.

Nova et Vetera, 2023

A contribution to Nova et Vetera's "Tracts for the Times" series, on confession. We naturally con... more A contribution to Nova et Vetera's "Tracts for the Times" series, on confession. We naturally confess through our bodies and our words, yet both of these have been problematized. Sacramental confession is the graced perfection of these confessions, instituted by Christ's wordless cry on the Cross.

Church Life Journal, 2023

A reprint of: “John Paul II’s Metaphysics of Labor.” In Holiness through Work: Commemorating the ... more A reprint of: “John Paul II’s Metaphysics of Labor.” In Holiness through Work: Commemorating the Encyclical Laborem Exercens, edited by Martin Schlag. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press, 2022.
Anglophone debates over John Paul II’s theory of labor are often concerned with his agreement with a neo-conservative economic program. While this is a worthwhile question, its terms do not do justice to the pope’s capacious worldview. John Paul II’s theory of labor fits within a larger metaphysical and aesthetic commitment, summarized in the key phrase from Person and Act: “action expresses the person.”[1] This personalistic commitment is central to the metaphysics of labor in Laborem Exercens.[2]
What follows will begin by developing the context for John Paul II’s understanding of labor. Using the work of Brad S. Gregory and Charles Taylor, the first two sections will engage in a brief historical survey. I will examine the late-medieval/early-modern shift in the valorization of work as part of ordinary life, a shift that was part of a larger divide created between being and action. The early-modern rejection of formal and final causality elevated instrumental reason, a move that also reconfigured human labor as purely instrumental.
Combined with the ascendency of voluntaristic pictures of God, the result was, as Joseph Ratzinger puts it, “man’s complete devotion to his own work as the only certainty.”[3] In the third section, I turn to John Paul II and LE to see how he affirms the ordinary life of work in a way distinct from that of the early moderns. The argument is that John Paul II’s aesthetic philosophy of the person provides a distinctive way of reconnecting being and action through expression. He returns to a sacramental, or semiological, account of action as revelatory of being, prior to any utilitarian purpose. I will conclude by showing how his approach bears fruit in the spirituality of work that he presents in LE. Such a spirituality prizes the “subjective” or personalistic meaning of labor before its “objective” use.

Church Life Journal, 2023

Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" is one of my recurring topics of exploration. To p... more Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" is one of my recurring topics of exploration. To put it briefly, our age prizes flexibility over stability, flow over institution, speed over space. Bauman’s work does not (as sociological) explore the deeper history of liquid modernity. That history reveals that modernity intrinsically tends toward liquefaction, even if many modern theorists hoped to maintain solid institutions. The liquefying element is rooted in modernity’s denial of formal and final causality, two of Aristotle’s four categories. Formal causality concerns what a thing is, while final causality what a thing is ordered to. Early modern philosophers and scientists dismissed formal and final causality as unscientific and irrelevant, but in so doing, they opened the world of persons, things, and desires to be ordered to . . . anything whatsoever. This move was often made in the name of freedom, but it might be more precise to say that it actually achieves liquification. As I will explore, the greater freedom of liquid modernity is a freedom of exploding choices (a freedom of indifference, as Servais Pinckaers puts it), rather than a greater interior liberty. A merely numerical increase in options can lead to paralysis and a greater unfreedom.

The question of who I am becomes especially vexed in a liquid age. In solid eras, such as pre-modern ones, people certainly asked the question, as instructed by the ancient Delphic Oracle. The concern was less individuating and more species-wide, however: who are we as human beings? The answers were generally cosmic and natural: I am part of the cosmic order arranged by the gods and transcendent forces, and I am a rational and political animal who should be concerned with pursuing justice toward the gods and my fellow men. If pressed about my individuality, I might point to my social status, my family or tribe or city or nation, and my attendant responsibilities. For example, a thousand years ago I might “identify” (not that I would have used that word back then) as a Christian, and thus a creature of the good God, a member of the family Franz, and a peasant working the lands of the lord of Heidelberg.

What happens when all these things—religion, the cosmos, status, wealth, family, and tribe—are liquified? What happens when we are able, or even instructed, to craft an identity apart from these “solids?” Then we have our world, a world in which numerous other identity-strategies are utilized.
First, however, one last historical note: let us not forget that the great historical solvent relativizing solids and valorizing liquidity was Christianity. Against the “solid” categories of race, tribe, status, and even family, Christianity preached that, in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ” (Gal 3:28). “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead” (Matt 8:22). Christianity first introduced an individuality normed not by these solid structures but by the liquidity of one’s individual mission in Christ—as with Paul, self-consciously knowing himself to be one “set apart” (Gal 1:15) from eternity by God, to be, as Acts puts it, God’s “chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” and to suffer (Acts 9:15–16). While Christianity clearly cannot endorse moral relativism and other related features of liquid modernity, it is not simply a “solid” institution.

Nova et Vetera , 2022

This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemp... more This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general.

Church Life Journal, 2022

Let us think through more deeply what women need, especially from higher-ed institutions. I will ... more Let us think through more deeply what women need, especially from higher-ed institutions. I will start with some reflections from my own position—a mother and a full-time professor in the humanities (theology). Then I will turn to more specific problems and solutions across the academic lifespan for colleges to consider.

Church Life Journal, 2022

In 1976 cultural theorist Michel Foucault argued that a fundamental shift in power happened aroun... more In 1976 cultural theorist Michel Foucault argued that a fundamental shift in power happened around the end of the eighteenth century.[1] For most of modernity, power was located in a sovereign, who had control over death and allowed everyone else to live. But by the end of the nineteenth century "biopower" replaced this "sovereign power." Biopower fostered life and allowed some people to die. Biopower functioned at the level of populations, as with demography, while a complementary "anatomo-politics" functioned at the level of the individual.[2]

Nova et Vetera, 2022

Reading Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord is a very great pleasure. His carefully argued a... more Reading Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord is a very great pleasure. His carefully argued and measured theology draws on the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas in original and fruitful ways. As a lover of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, I must confess that my enjoyment was occasionally tempered with suffering—but, shall we say, only in the lower parts of my soul.
Among the many things I appreciate in this book is Fr. White’s love of patristic and medieval sources. Following his guide, St. Thomas Aquinas, he combines precision with breadth of knowledge and depth of thought. Further, like St. Thomas’s generous reading of manifold sources, Fr. White makes frequent irenic gestures. I am thinking in particular of the emphasis on the filial mode of Christ’s obedience throughout, plus the gentle reading of Barth’s treatment of obedience and the end of chapter 8 on the death of Christ.
He and I share many points of agreement, almost too many to mention: the enduring importance of Chalcedonian Christological metaphysics; a suspicion of liberal historicism; and an opposition to theological anachronisms, in which the Person of Christ is interpreted according to contemporary mores rather than through revelation. I will expand on two areas of particular agreement (on analogy and on the Son’s obedience), before raising a question concerning the Beatific Vision, and then recording some criticisms regarding soteriology (specifically, regarding Christ’s abandonment and descent).

Church Life Journal, 2022

According to one history of secularization, we owe our very selves to it. As C. S. Lewis's god-ha... more According to one history of secularization, we owe our very selves to it. As C. S. Lewis's god-haunted protagonist in Till We Have Faces exclaims to the deities, "There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own." According to this model, only when we are detached from the divine can we come into our own.

Yet, this somewhat simplistic narrative misses the deeper dynamics at play within the secular self. In what follows I will begin by examining some current debates about secularization. I will then defend what I think is key to contemporary secularism when it comes to the self and identity, namely, the "ninety-degree turn." My point will be that this turn, which immanentizes the divine, stresses finite being beyond what it can bear. The resulting fractures are seen most clearly in the splintered and empty self of poststructuralist philosophy. We are left not with thriving selves but with lost ones.

Church Life Journal, 2021

This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemp... more This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general.

The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 2018

Is postlapsarian sexual desire primarily altruistic or disordered? This paper utilizes the resour... more Is postlapsarian sexual desire primarily altruistic or disordered? This paper utilizes the resources in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and in the contemporary magisterium to argue that recent phenomena such as the #MeToo movement underscore the inherently unstable and aggressive nature of sexual desire when it is uprooted from its natural end (i.e., is end-less). Aquinas highlights three aspects of desire that more sex-positive accounts of sexuality would do well to heed: its natural infinity, its self-referential nature (grounded in amor concupiscentiae), and its power of rationalization. By directing the motor of desire toward its natural ends, virtue—led by reason—can redirect desire away from self and toward the good.

Church Life Journal, 2021

In previous essays, I have argued, with Zygmunt Bauman, that we live in an age of liquidity and e... more In previous essays, I have argued, with Zygmunt Bauman, that we live in an age of liquidity and empty selves. Does this era of liquid modernity and widespread narcissism bring with it distinctive fears and hence distinctive monsters? In what follows I will argue that the explosion of vampire stories (both fictional and purportedly real) in the eighteenth century follows logically upon the publication of William Harvey’s research on the heart and the circulatory system in 1628. The growing loss of a sense of self, which came with the newfound fluidity of the body and with modernity’s social and intellectual dislocations, expressed itself in new fears. What if our selfhood could be drained out of us? And what if we are left as dry husks of men, as the living dead?

Church Life Journal, 2021

I summarize here how the body has been liquidated in contemporary theory, beginning with Judith B... more I summarize here how the body has been liquidated in contemporary theory, beginning with Judith Butler and then turning to modern biological mechanism. While both lose the living human body, they do it differently: Butler by privileging fluidity and mechanism by privileging the dead machine.

I will then present an alternative view, relying on Plato, Aristotle, and maverick bioethicist Stephen Talbott. I will argue that the body can be seen, as Talbott says, as a “formed stream” in which flow and organization each have a place.

Church Life Journal, 2021

What do your desires mean? The average university graduate would have a hard time parsing this si... more What do your desires mean? The average university graduate would have a hard time parsing this simple query. Since when is desire about meaning? I trace the recent liquefaction of desire as part of liquid modernity and analyze the rejection of purpose and meaning in desire by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. I then offer a Christian alternative.

The New Ressourcement, 2024

In a speech to the Goethestiftung the year before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar thanked Goeth... more In a speech to the Goethestiftung the year before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar thanked Goethe for a key insight: that intellectual work should strive for "seeing, evaluating, and interpreting a figure" (or Gestalt) in a "synthetic look." 1 This Goethe-inspired synthetic contemplation was, he said, so attractive because it counteracted his experience of theological learning under neo-Scholastic manuals. The manual divided up the mystery of God into separate treatises; Christology was presented as "a particularly thorny hedge," a mass of heresies to avoid. It was, he said, "a quantity of materials, but it was not possible to discover any form" to the theological construction. 2 While manuals have long fallen from favor, Balthasar's complaint of disciplinary formlessness is as contemporary as ever. The past obsession with heresy-criticism has given way to other trends, but then, as now, a positive vision of the form of theology is missing. Within the academy, this problem is not confined to theology. As Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, the modern university is better called a "multiversity," each

Thomist, Apr 1, 2023

Synodality can be a movement that deserves a theology. I will argue that synodality points to the... more Synodality can be a movement that deserves a theology. I will argue that synodality points to the Way who is Christ (syn-hodos as a meeting of the way) and can be
conceived in terms of the dynamics of ecclesial communio, itself a theological transposition of the one-many question. Understood this way, synodality expresses a symphony of pneumatic charisms and missions discerned within the Church.

Nova et Vetera, 2023

A contribution to Nova et Vetera's "Tracts for the Times" series, on confession. We naturally con... more A contribution to Nova et Vetera's "Tracts for the Times" series, on confession. We naturally confess through our bodies and our words, yet both of these have been problematized. Sacramental confession is the graced perfection of these confessions, instituted by Christ's wordless cry on the Cross.

Church Life Journal, 2023

A reprint of: “John Paul II’s Metaphysics of Labor.” In Holiness through Work: Commemorating the ... more A reprint of: “John Paul II’s Metaphysics of Labor.” In Holiness through Work: Commemorating the Encyclical Laborem Exercens, edited by Martin Schlag. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press, 2022.
Anglophone debates over John Paul II’s theory of labor are often concerned with his agreement with a neo-conservative economic program. While this is a worthwhile question, its terms do not do justice to the pope’s capacious worldview. John Paul II’s theory of labor fits within a larger metaphysical and aesthetic commitment, summarized in the key phrase from Person and Act: “action expresses the person.”[1] This personalistic commitment is central to the metaphysics of labor in Laborem Exercens.[2]
What follows will begin by developing the context for John Paul II’s understanding of labor. Using the work of Brad S. Gregory and Charles Taylor, the first two sections will engage in a brief historical survey. I will examine the late-medieval/early-modern shift in the valorization of work as part of ordinary life, a shift that was part of a larger divide created between being and action. The early-modern rejection of formal and final causality elevated instrumental reason, a move that also reconfigured human labor as purely instrumental.
Combined with the ascendency of voluntaristic pictures of God, the result was, as Joseph Ratzinger puts it, “man’s complete devotion to his own work as the only certainty.”[3] In the third section, I turn to John Paul II and LE to see how he affirms the ordinary life of work in a way distinct from that of the early moderns. The argument is that John Paul II’s aesthetic philosophy of the person provides a distinctive way of reconnecting being and action through expression. He returns to a sacramental, or semiological, account of action as revelatory of being, prior to any utilitarian purpose. I will conclude by showing how his approach bears fruit in the spirituality of work that he presents in LE. Such a spirituality prizes the “subjective” or personalistic meaning of labor before its “objective” use.

Church Life Journal, 2023

Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" is one of my recurring topics of exploration. To p... more Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" is one of my recurring topics of exploration. To put it briefly, our age prizes flexibility over stability, flow over institution, speed over space. Bauman’s work does not (as sociological) explore the deeper history of liquid modernity. That history reveals that modernity intrinsically tends toward liquefaction, even if many modern theorists hoped to maintain solid institutions. The liquefying element is rooted in modernity’s denial of formal and final causality, two of Aristotle’s four categories. Formal causality concerns what a thing is, while final causality what a thing is ordered to. Early modern philosophers and scientists dismissed formal and final causality as unscientific and irrelevant, but in so doing, they opened the world of persons, things, and desires to be ordered to . . . anything whatsoever. This move was often made in the name of freedom, but it might be more precise to say that it actually achieves liquification. As I will explore, the greater freedom of liquid modernity is a freedom of exploding choices (a freedom of indifference, as Servais Pinckaers puts it), rather than a greater interior liberty. A merely numerical increase in options can lead to paralysis and a greater unfreedom.

The question of who I am becomes especially vexed in a liquid age. In solid eras, such as pre-modern ones, people certainly asked the question, as instructed by the ancient Delphic Oracle. The concern was less individuating and more species-wide, however: who are we as human beings? The answers were generally cosmic and natural: I am part of the cosmic order arranged by the gods and transcendent forces, and I am a rational and political animal who should be concerned with pursuing justice toward the gods and my fellow men. If pressed about my individuality, I might point to my social status, my family or tribe or city or nation, and my attendant responsibilities. For example, a thousand years ago I might “identify” (not that I would have used that word back then) as a Christian, and thus a creature of the good God, a member of the family Franz, and a peasant working the lands of the lord of Heidelberg.

What happens when all these things—religion, the cosmos, status, wealth, family, and tribe—are liquified? What happens when we are able, or even instructed, to craft an identity apart from these “solids?” Then we have our world, a world in which numerous other identity-strategies are utilized.
First, however, one last historical note: let us not forget that the great historical solvent relativizing solids and valorizing liquidity was Christianity. Against the “solid” categories of race, tribe, status, and even family, Christianity preached that, in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ” (Gal 3:28). “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead” (Matt 8:22). Christianity first introduced an individuality normed not by these solid structures but by the liquidity of one’s individual mission in Christ—as with Paul, self-consciously knowing himself to be one “set apart” (Gal 1:15) from eternity by God, to be, as Acts puts it, God’s “chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” and to suffer (Acts 9:15–16). While Christianity clearly cannot endorse moral relativism and other related features of liquid modernity, it is not simply a “solid” institution.

Nova et Vetera , 2022

This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemp... more This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general.

Church Life Journal, 2022

Let us think through more deeply what women need, especially from higher-ed institutions. I will ... more Let us think through more deeply what women need, especially from higher-ed institutions. I will start with some reflections from my own position—a mother and a full-time professor in the humanities (theology). Then I will turn to more specific problems and solutions across the academic lifespan for colleges to consider.

Church Life Journal, 2022

In 1976 cultural theorist Michel Foucault argued that a fundamental shift in power happened aroun... more In 1976 cultural theorist Michel Foucault argued that a fundamental shift in power happened around the end of the eighteenth century.[1] For most of modernity, power was located in a sovereign, who had control over death and allowed everyone else to live. But by the end of the nineteenth century "biopower" replaced this "sovereign power." Biopower fostered life and allowed some people to die. Biopower functioned at the level of populations, as with demography, while a complementary "anatomo-politics" functioned at the level of the individual.[2]

Nova et Vetera, 2022

Reading Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord is a very great pleasure. His carefully argued a... more Reading Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord is a very great pleasure. His carefully argued and measured theology draws on the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas in original and fruitful ways. As a lover of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, I must confess that my enjoyment was occasionally tempered with suffering—but, shall we say, only in the lower parts of my soul.
Among the many things I appreciate in this book is Fr. White’s love of patristic and medieval sources. Following his guide, St. Thomas Aquinas, he combines precision with breadth of knowledge and depth of thought. Further, like St. Thomas’s generous reading of manifold sources, Fr. White makes frequent irenic gestures. I am thinking in particular of the emphasis on the filial mode of Christ’s obedience throughout, plus the gentle reading of Barth’s treatment of obedience and the end of chapter 8 on the death of Christ.
He and I share many points of agreement, almost too many to mention: the enduring importance of Chalcedonian Christological metaphysics; a suspicion of liberal historicism; and an opposition to theological anachronisms, in which the Person of Christ is interpreted according to contemporary mores rather than through revelation. I will expand on two areas of particular agreement (on analogy and on the Son’s obedience), before raising a question concerning the Beatific Vision, and then recording some criticisms regarding soteriology (specifically, regarding Christ’s abandonment and descent).

Church Life Journal, 2022

According to one history of secularization, we owe our very selves to it. As C. S. Lewis's god-ha... more According to one history of secularization, we owe our very selves to it. As C. S. Lewis's god-haunted protagonist in Till We Have Faces exclaims to the deities, "There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own." According to this model, only when we are detached from the divine can we come into our own.

Yet, this somewhat simplistic narrative misses the deeper dynamics at play within the secular self. In what follows I will begin by examining some current debates about secularization. I will then defend what I think is key to contemporary secularism when it comes to the self and identity, namely, the "ninety-degree turn." My point will be that this turn, which immanentizes the divine, stresses finite being beyond what it can bear. The resulting fractures are seen most clearly in the splintered and empty self of poststructuralist philosophy. We are left not with thriving selves but with lost ones.

Church Life Journal, 2021

This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemp... more This essay will examine Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general.

The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 2018

Is postlapsarian sexual desire primarily altruistic or disordered? This paper utilizes the resour... more Is postlapsarian sexual desire primarily altruistic or disordered? This paper utilizes the resources in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and in the contemporary magisterium to argue that recent phenomena such as the #MeToo movement underscore the inherently unstable and aggressive nature of sexual desire when it is uprooted from its natural end (i.e., is end-less). Aquinas highlights three aspects of desire that more sex-positive accounts of sexuality would do well to heed: its natural infinity, its self-referential nature (grounded in amor concupiscentiae), and its power of rationalization. By directing the motor of desire toward its natural ends, virtue—led by reason—can redirect desire away from self and toward the good.

Church Life Journal, 2021

In previous essays, I have argued, with Zygmunt Bauman, that we live in an age of liquidity and e... more In previous essays, I have argued, with Zygmunt Bauman, that we live in an age of liquidity and empty selves. Does this era of liquid modernity and widespread narcissism bring with it distinctive fears and hence distinctive monsters? In what follows I will argue that the explosion of vampire stories (both fictional and purportedly real) in the eighteenth century follows logically upon the publication of William Harvey’s research on the heart and the circulatory system in 1628. The growing loss of a sense of self, which came with the newfound fluidity of the body and with modernity’s social and intellectual dislocations, expressed itself in new fears. What if our selfhood could be drained out of us? And what if we are left as dry husks of men, as the living dead?

Church Life Journal, 2021

I summarize here how the body has been liquidated in contemporary theory, beginning with Judith B... more I summarize here how the body has been liquidated in contemporary theory, beginning with Judith Butler and then turning to modern biological mechanism. While both lose the living human body, they do it differently: Butler by privileging fluidity and mechanism by privileging the dead machine.

I will then present an alternative view, relying on Plato, Aristotle, and maverick bioethicist Stephen Talbott. I will argue that the body can be seen, as Talbott says, as a “formed stream” in which flow and organization each have a place.

Church Life Journal, 2021

What do your desires mean? The average university graduate would have a hard time parsing this si... more What do your desires mean? The average university graduate would have a hard time parsing this simple query. Since when is desire about meaning? I trace the recent liquefaction of desire as part of liquid modernity and analyze the rejection of purpose and meaning in desire by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. I then offer a Christian alternative.

The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 2003

The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 2003

Nova et Vetera, 2019

My review of Thomas Petri's Aquinas and the Theology of the Body: The Thomistic Foundations of Jo... more My review of Thomas Petri's Aquinas and the Theology of the Body: The Thomistic Foundations of John Paul II’s Anthropology, pp. 305-309.