The Root of Friendship addresses the connections between self-love and self-governance in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and defends three related theses. First, Aquinas's account of proper self-love is a description of the nature and importance of a person's subjective self- experience. Second, his notion of self-governance cannot be understood fully unless we grasp its basis in self-love. Finally, his account both satisfies contemporary conditions of relevance for self-governance and offers attractive solutions to issues raised in analytic discussions on such matters. Accordingly, the book provides a systematic account of Aquinas's thoughts on the nature of a person's self-experience and the role that experience plays in self-governance. Self-love, especially as fully actualized in self-friendship, constitutes a person's experience of himself. In turn, it is the subjective pole both for a person's ongoing experiences of the world, including goods, and for acting in the world, particularly in terms of consciously responding to the good. Since a person's fundamental awareness of and response to the good are found in the self-experience that results from self-love, particularly insofar as self-love includes the desire for and activity of pursuing goods and avoiding evils, self-governance naturally derives from it. In addition, a person who loves himself wickedly fails to seek and acquire the goods perfective of his personal nature. Lastly, the book provides an argument to the conclusion that once we attend to the connections between self-love and self-governance, we find attractive features of Aquinas's overall account that make it relevant to contemporary discussions on self-governance, particularly those in the analytic tradition. The key features are examined in light of these discussions.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Love: Aquinas on Participation, Unity, and Union offers a systematic treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the metaphysical relations of unity-to-union and unity-to-participation in God as the key structuring elements to the nature of love and friendship. In general, Aquinas identifies love as the source and summit of the life of each human being. Everything in the created realm issues forth from God's creative love, and the ultimate end of all human persons is the greatest possible union with God. Aquinas contends that the love of friendship allows for the greatest union between two persons; thus, the greatest union with God takes the form of friendship with him.In addition to the grand metaphysical bookends of human existence, love also serves as the structuring notion of Aquinas's anthropology and practical philosophy. He characterizes much of human life in terms of three basic love relations: love of God, love of self, and love of neighbor. Love of self derives from personal substantial unity. It is logically prior to love of neighbor and serves as a template for the latter. If a person loves himself rightly, he will love others rightly. On the other hand, if he relates to himself through a disordered love, he neither can relate to others rightly nor enter into a deep union with them. Moreover, due to a person's metaphysical participation in God, a person loves himself properly only when he loves God more than himself. Thus, failing to love God appropriately entails an inability to relate to others with a fully developed love. Conversely, the love of God positions a person to relate to others with an authentic love and enter into the union of friendship with them. The volume concludes with a look at personal subjectivity in light of the previous analyses.

This first-ever interdisciplinary study of woman as prophet shows that, in these troubling times, ordinary women-especially Christian women-need to function as prophets by proclaiming, in word and deed, the indispensability of lovingly seeking the welfare of others. More specifically, social science shows that the person-centered love prophesied by women prophets is able to meet interpersonal challenges within the home and world, while philosophy and theology establish that women are able to excel as prophets due to the virtuous dispositions inculcated by femininity, the choice to be caring, a God-centered spirituality, and a pro-life humanitarian/personalist feminism that welcomes male collaborators. Facilitating the ability of Christian women to prophesy love are Baptismal graces, Thomistic virtues, and a much needed prophetic Marian ecclesiology based on what John Paul II calls the "prophetism of femininity." These interdisciplinary findings provide an essential resource for educators and students of humanity, the theology of women, and evangelization. These findings emerge, first, from an investigation into the cognitive and ontological underpinnings of what John Paul II called the "feminine genius." A second set of findings emerges from exploring the prophetic dimensions of the feminine genius, secular feminism's need to adopt the insights of Christianity, and the ability of femininity's prophetism to recast both femininity and feminism as Marian prophecies. A third set of findings arises from analyzing the spirituality of women prophets within the Christian tradition by considering the conditions necessary for prophesying, explicating requisite Thomistic virtues, and delving into the spirituality of Hildegard, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila. A fourth set of findings arises from innovative studies of polarization, secularization, lust, romantic love, the conditions whereby mothers with careers can flourish, and the ability of nuns to combat racism in a small Midwestern town. Overall, these interdisciplinary investigations explicate the theology of women and show that women who prophesy love, either in the order of grace or nature, can help heal lives, families, and culture.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Love: Aquinas on Participation, Unity, and Union offers a systematic treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the metaphysical relations of unity-to-union and unity-to-participation in God as the key structuring elements to the nature of love and friendship. In general, Aquinas identifies love as the source and summit of the life of each human being. Everything in the created realm issues forth from God's creative love, and the ultimate end of all human persons is the greatest possible union with God. Aquinas contends that the love of friendship allows for the greatest union between two persons; thus, the greatest union with God takes the form of friendship with him. In addition to the grand metaphysical bookends of human existence, love also serves as the structuring notion of Aquinas's anthropology and practical philosophy. He characterizes much of human life in terms of three basic love relations: love of God, love of self, and love of neighbor. Love of self derives from personal substantial unity. It is logically prior to love of neighbor and serves as a template for the latter. If a person loves himself rightly, he will love others rightly. On the other hand, if he relates to himself through a disordered love, he neither can relate to others rightly nor enter into a deep union with them. Moreover, due to a person's metaphysical participation in God, a person loves himself properly only when he loves God more than himself. Thus, failing to love God appropriately entails an inability to relate to others with a fully developed love. Conversely, the love of God positions a person to relate to others with an authentic love and enter into the union of friendship with them. The volume concludes with a look at personal subjectivity in light of the previous analyses.