Albertus Magnus Institute Courses

This course will focus on a distinctively Thomistic approach to bioethics and the resources that Aquinas’s natural law theory and metaphysics may provide in addressing some of the most important contemporary bioethics issues.  The first part of the course will focus on the foundations and principles of Thomistic ethical theory through a selection of Thomistic primary texts as well as secondary sources such as Ralph McInerny's Ethica Thomistica and Jason Eberl's Thomistic Principles and Bioethics.  In the second part of the course we will turn to a careful examination of several of the most important and difficult controversies in contemporary Catholic Bioethics: the moral status of zygotes, embryos, fetuses, and anencephalic infants, embryonic stem cell research, ANT-OAR, vital conflicts, embryo adoption and transfer, artificial wombs, life-saving interventions, genethics, designer children, human enhancement, neuroethics, issues at the end of human life, the ordinary/extraordinary means distinction, artificial hydration and nutrition, euthanasia, organ donation, complicity in evil, conscientious objection, and health care law and policy.

Dante makes Thomas Aquinas the first voice of the Heaven of the Sun (Paradiso, Canto 10), and hence offers him as an emblem—perhaps the emblem—of redeemed creaturely wisdom. Dante recognized in Thomas the "teacher for everyone" (doctor communis) long before that usage became general; and so Dante reflects (and reflects deeply upon) Thomas' comprehensive sacra doctrina  as he constructs his comprehensive allegory of love and responsibility.  This course will read The Divine Comedy with an eye for important junctures at which Thomas' teaching proves especially relevant, and the course will address Dante's text in light of that teaching.

This year is the 700th anniversary of the death of perhaps the greatest poet in the history of the world, Dante Alighieri. His Divine Comedy is about everything you can name: God and His universe, the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the history of mankind, what it means to be a creature made in the image of God, what love is, and art, and sin, and repentance, and redemption— and what you do when your city banishes you and confiscates your property—everything! We will follow our guide into the sinkhole of Hell, then up the mount of Purgatory and on into Paradise.

Joseph Pearce, author of three books on Shakespeare and editor of six of the Ignatius Critical Editions of Shakespeare’s plays, teaches the inaugural course on Shakespeare for the Magnus Fellowship. Join Professor Pearce for this eight-week course as he leads us on a journey into Shakespeare and his times, exploring the deepest dimension of four of his greatest plays: Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear.

Despite being a part of philosophy profoundly neglected by the modern academy, the philosophy of nature is both an essential component of the traditional order of learning and a science which every well educated man must possess within his soul. In this course, we shall study the principles and properties of mobile being as such at the feet of two master teachers, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.

The modern understanding of happiness is an apple that has fallen far from the tree that the Greek's named "eudaimonia". Please join us for an engaging course in this the inaugural semester of the Magnus Fellowship with author and scholar, Deal Hudson. This eight-week course will be composed of equal parts lecture and text-based discussion and survey the tradition on the question of human happiness through the eyes of the Ancients, Medievals, and Moderns. How has the idea of happiness lost its moral meaning and became the justification of immoral behavior and unbelief? Most importantly, can we recover the traditional understanding of human beatitude?