Comments on Fr. Thomas White’s Essay (2019) "Thomism for the New Evangelization"

By Razie Mah

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., is the author of several books, such as Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Natural Philosophy (Sapientia Press, 2009), The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (UA Press, 2015) and Exodus (Brazos Press, 2016). In 2019, he writes an essay that goes “viral”, in the specialized language of internet social media. So, how do I attribute the work to a journal or book?
Is such an attribution necessary?
Not in this case.
Fr. White addresses a pivotal question, “Why does Thomism matter today?”
If Christians are to sway the hearts and minds of the modern “not religious”, then ‘something’ must address the mind. Thomism fits the bill, even though modernism, the Age of Ideas, appears to have completely displaced the scholasticism of the Latin Age.
Consequently, the Thomism of the Latin Age may need a postmodern supplement, complement and, perhaps, intoxicant. How about techniques for synthetic thinking?
Charles Peirce offers such techniques for such synthesis. These techniques entangle Thomism. These comments show how the Thomist tradition finds strange new realness in Peirce’s approach.
Should this be a surprise?
The late Thomist John Deely discovers that Charles Peirce’s definition of sign (formulated in the late 1800s) is the same as the one offered by John of St. Thomas (otherwise known as John Poinsot, writing in the mid 1600s). Indeed, Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2014) Ens Rationis, shows that the Baroque scholastics address postmodern topics, such as the difference between fact and fiction. Indeed, Novotny’s line from Suarez to Caramuel is strangely familiar and funny, in the same way that postmodernism is comedic.
So, pour a glass of wine and consider these comments, offered in the spirit of the new happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Nov 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781942824831

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

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Comments on Fr. Thomas White’s Essay (2019) Thomism for the New Evangelization

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2019

Notes on Text

This work comments on an essay by Father Thomas Joseph White, O.P., on the role of Thomism in the New Evangelization. The New Evangelization is what happens after the wake-up call, the bankruptcy, and all the other events conveying that postmodernism, too, passes. According to John Deely, the fourth age of understanding dawns. Welcome to the Age of Triadic Relations.

Modernism has been re-branded as postmodernism, in the same way that the term liberal, has been re-branded as progressive, and further re-branded as woke. Why is all this word play necessary? People are unhappy.

Indeed, the current citizen finds it difficult to pinpoint the sources of his unhappiness. White identifies six.

Thomism, the scholastic philosophy of the Latin Age, offers a way to address each of them, allowing us to drink from the fountain of happiness, so to speak.

These comments spike the punch bowl.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction, Comments on Jacques Maritain’s Book (1935) Natural Philosophy

Recommended: Comments on Michal Chaberek, O.P.’s Essay (2019) Classical Metaphysics and Theistic Evolution, Comments on Donna West’s Essay (2019) Thirdness along the Intuitional Path, Comments on Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P.’s Essay (2019) What do God and Creatures Really Do in an Evolutionary Change?, Comments on James V. Schall SJ’s Essay (2017) Political Philosophy and Catholicism

Table of Contents

Promises

The First Tombstone

The Second Tombstone

The Third Tombstone

The Fourth Tombstone

The Fifth Tombstone

The Sixth Tombstone

Promises

0001 What does Thomism, the philosophical tradition of Thomas Aquinas, promise?

Thomism