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Mar
24
Aquinas Lecture | Professor Christopher Brown
Event details
What do Catholics mean when they say in the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in the communion of the saints”?
One very important thing they mean is: we can be friends in this life with the saints in heaven. In this talk Professor Brown explains the significance of this claim by offering answers to the following questions: what is friendship? And given what the best kind of friendship is, how can we be friends with Mary and the saints in this life? How could Mary and the saints in heaven possibly be aware of us and of our needs? How can Mary and the saints respond to all those prayers we send their way? To answer these questions, Professor Brown draws on Aristotle’s account of perfect friendship and St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of the beatific vision of the saints in heaven.
Christopher M. Brown is professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM), where he teaches courses in ancient and medieval philosophy, distributism, science and religion, love and friendship, and the philosophy of religion. He also co-teaches Great Works courses in the UTM University Scholars program. He received a bachelor of music degree in percussion performance from Western Michigan University, a M.A. in humanities from Western Kentucky University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from St. Louis University. Dr. Brown has published in The Thomist, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, and Lux Veritatis. His latest book is Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions (The Catholic University of America Press, 2021). The book explains and defends St. Thomas Aquinas's account of heaven.
