Christian History articles from February 2002

Christian History archives from February 2002

Did you know? Interesting and unusual facts about Thomas Aquinas.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Trounced In this detail from Andrea di Bonaiuto's fourteenth-century fresco The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas (see page 13 for the whole image), heretics Averroes and Arius crouch beneath the enthroned Aquinas. Averroes (also called...

The eminent obscure. (From The Editor).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
February 1, 2002... About a year and a half ago, we listed a number of potential issue topics on a survey and asked you, our readers, to choose your favorites. We figured that you would be most interested in American personalities, ministry pioneers, or maybe...

The dazzling `dumb ox': his family thought he was throwing his life away. His classmates thought he was stupid. They didn't understand.
February 1, 2002... Shortly after Thomas Aquinas died, on March 7, 1274, miracles began to occur near his body. The monks of the Cistercian abbey at Fossanova, where Thomas was buried, feared that the remains might be stolen and taken off to a Dominican resting...

The Summa & its parts: taken as a whole, the Summa Theologica overwhelms most readers. So take one bite at a time.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2002... Many theologians and philosophers in St. Thomas's time wrote Summas. A Summa is simply a summary. It is more like an encyclopedia than a textbook, and it is meant to be used more as a reference library than as a book. There is extreme economy...

Devoutly I adore Thee.(Poem)
February 1, 2002... Devoutly I Adore Thee O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee, Who truly art within the forms before me; To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee, As failing quite in contemplating Thee. Sight, touch, and taste in...

Medieval U.: how accounting, Aristotle, and the first teachers' unions transformed higher education.
February 1, 2002... Nowadays the worst part of being the youngest child is the hand-me-down clothes. But in the early Middle Ages, the youngest child couldn't inherit land and often faced a life of hard labor as a serf. As the population grew, these landless...

Good habits: Benedictines, Franciscans, and Dominicans all sought to live by high ideals, but only one order matched Thomas's love for both spirituality and intelligent.
February 1, 2002... Authorities at Oxford University in the fourteenth century bore a grudge against Dominican friars. "We have learned from experience," grumbled the Congregation of Masters at Oxford, "that noble persons of this kingdom, gentlemen, and even...

Storms of the thirteenth century: the Christian history timeline.
February 1, 2002... Aquinas 1225 Thomas Aquinas born at Roccasecca 1230 Begins studies at Montecassino 1239 Continues studies at University of Naples 1244 Joins Dominicans; family protests decision by imprisoning him for a year ...

Theology on the edge: when competing ideologies had fragmented Christian thought, Thomas forged a solution.
February 1, 2002... Thomas Aquinas appeared at one of the most critical times in church history. Science, secularism, and human reason battered Christian theology. Thomas reconciled apparently contradictory forces, enabling the intellectual structure of the...

Scholastic superstars: the white heat produced by these great minds lit up the High Middle Ages. (The Gallery).
February 1, 2002... Mr. Middle Ground Peter Lombard c. 1100-1160 Peter Lombard's birthplace, the Piedmontese town of Novara, lies at a strategic crossroads between Turin, Milan, Genoa, and Switzerland. When Peter found himself at the crossroads of...

A mingling of minds: why was one of Christianity's best thinkers so ready to learn a Muslim and a Jew?
February 1, 2002... The work of Thomas Aquinas may be distinguished from that of any of his contemporaries by his attention to the writings of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Jew, and Avicenna, (980-1037) a Muslim. His contemporaries, especially in Paris, were...

Popes, philosophers, & peeping Thomists: whenever it seems that Aquinas might recede into dusty memory, a new wave of truth-seekers brings him back.(Saint Thomas Aquinas)
February 1, 2002... A significant Catholic moment occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Consider these American success stories: Catholic Archbishop Fulton Sheen's TV program Life Is Worth Living (1951-1957) reached 30 million viewers and earned...

He's our man: evangelicals can embrace a rich inheritance from Aquinas: a conversation with Norman Geisler. (The Link Interview).(Interview)
February 1, 2002... In a 1974 Christianity Today article marking the 700th anniversary of Aquinas's death, author Ronald Nash said some nice things about the deceased but ultimately judged his system of thought "unsuitable for a biblically centered Christian...

Thomas Aquinas. (Resources).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Most material on Aquinas gets very philosophical very quickly. This is unfortunate, as the first sight of a passage like "every essence or quiddity can be understood without knowing anything about its existing (esse)" makes a typical...