General Principles of Sacramental Theology addresses a current lacuna in English-language theological literature. Bernard Leeming's highly respected book Principles of Sacramental Theology was published more than sixty years ago. Since that time, there has been a noted decrease, especially in English-language sacramental theology, in treatments of the basic topics and principles-such as the nature of the sacraments of signs, sacramental grace, sacramental character, sacramental causality, sacramental intention, the necessity and number of the sacraments, sacramental matter and form, inter alia-which apply to all of the sacraments. Rather than deconstruct the Church's tradition, as many recent books on the sacraments do, Roger Nutt offers a vibrant presentation of these principles as a sound foundation for a renewed appreciation of each of the seven sacraments in the Christian life as the divinely willed means of communion and friendship between God and humanity. The sacraments bestow and nourish the personal communion with Jesus Christ that is the true source of human happiness. Recourse to the patrimony of Catholic wisdom, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, can help to highlight the sacraments and their significance within the plan of salvation. This book will be of use in seminary, graduate, and undergraduate courses. It is further offered as a source of hope to all those seeking deeper intimacy with God amidst the confusion, alienation, and disappointment that accompanies life in a fallen world. The sacraments play an irreplaceable role in pursuing a Universal Call to Holiness that is so central to Vatican II's teaching.

But who do you say that I am?"" asks Jesus at the decisive turning point in the Gospel. Simon Peter answers correctly at first but is soon corrected when he protests the revelation of the Cross. Christians in every age are called to confess the right faith in Jesus, who suffered, died, and rose for our salvation. Our own period is beset by a crisis of faith in Jesus, which has had manifold deleterious effects on our lives, our Christian communities, and our world. For the sake of addressing this crisis, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty at the Dominican House of Studies cosponsored an international conference that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Crisis of Christology. Beginning with a gripping foreword by Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this volume gathers together several of the excellent conference presentations given by scholars working in North America, South America, Europe, and Western Asia. These studies consider both formulations of who Christ is and of how we are under his judgement. With help from Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition, this work engages today's crisis of Christology as seen in multiple theological topics and offers models of faith to answer Jesus' question for ourselves, ""But who do you say that I am?

St. Thomas Aquinas preaches in his sermon Puer Iesus, "Just as your father begot you bodily, your teacher begot you spiritually." St. Thomas himself has been blessed with prodigious fecundity through the centuries for his teaching in the Holy Spirit. Always, he leads us to think of the Blessed Trinity and all things from God's own view. With new insights into St. Thomas's spiritual teaching in its sources, context, breadth, wisdom, and influences, Thomas Aquinas as Spiritual Teacher presents chapters inspired by an international conference cosponsored by the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Dominican House of Studies. The volume, like its conference, honors Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his dedication to the spiritual teaching of St. Thomas in several decades of service to the Church and the academy. Luis F. Cardinal Ladaria, SJ, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, contributed the volume's foreword.

Mother Teresa was one of those rare figures in history who enjoyed a wide and solid reputation of holiness during her lifetime. She became-for Catholics, Christians, and those of other faiths or even of none-a symbol of kindness, compassion, and tender care of the poorest people throughout the world. Known as a joyful and generous soul, Mother Teresa inspired countless persons to experience the "joy of loving," as she liked to say, through their own acts of love and compassion. It thus came as a total surprise to everyone, including the members of her own religious family, the Missionaries of Charity, that Mother Teresa experienced nearly fifty years of what she called "the darkness." When a book of her private letters, Come, be My Light, was published in 2007, it caused a sensation. It received worldwide media attention, including as the cover story of Time magazine. People struggled to understand it; many misunderstood it, some entirely! As the president of Ave Maria University, Jim Towey, tells us in the introduction, many questions abound about Mother Teresa's darkness: "What are we to make of the spiritual darkness that enshrouded Mother Teresa so tightly? Could the words and experiences of this little Albanian woman with no advanced formal education have anything to say to the challenges the twenty-first century presents?" Ave Maria University gathered theologians to begin answering these questions and others. The resulting symposium provided the contents of this book. The first such assembly of scholarly work on the topic, Mother Teresa and the Mystics offers readers the opportunity to enter much more deeply into the interior-even mystical-world of St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Scholars have often been quick to acknowledge Thomas Aquinas's distinctive retrieval of Aristotle's Greek philosophical heritage. Often lagging, however, has been a proper appreciation of both his originality and indebtedness in appropriating the great theological insights of the Greek Fathers of the Church. In a similar way to his integration of the Aristotelian philosophical corpus, Aquinas successfully interwove the often newly received and translated Greek patristic sources into a thirteenth-century theological framework, one dominated by the Latin Fathers. His use of the Greek Fathers definitively shaped his exposition of sacra doctrina in the fundamental areas of God and creation, Trinitarian theology, the moral life, and Christ and the Sacraments. For the sake of filling this lacuna and of piquing scholarly interest in Aquinas's relation to the Fathers of the Christian East, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies co-sponsored an international gathering of scholars that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Sensitive to the commonalities and the differences between Aquinas and the Greek Fathers, the essays in this volume have sprung from the theme of this conference and offer a harvest of some of the conference's fruits. At long last, scholars have a rich volume of diverse, penetrating essays that both underscore Aquinas's unique standing among the Latin scholastics in relationship to the Greek Fathers and point the way toward avenues of further study.

In light of the shock and confusion caused by the clerical scandals of the summer of 2018, Ave Maria University organized a conference offering a response to the crisis. Its aim would be to use Ave Maria University's commitment to serving the Church through faithful scholarship as a platform to offer helpful reflections on what had taken place and how the Church might move forward. As a mission-driven institution, Ave Maria University wanted to offer its fidelity to truth as a Catholic university; its Marian identity as ""Ave Maria"" University, and the learned wisdom of its own professors and scholarly friends as a resource for the faithful and Church leaders to turn to during this time of crisis. The conference, ""Crisis in the Church: On the Faith of Mary as the Pathway to Peace,"" took place on the Ave Maria University campus on January 11-12, 2019. The quality of the papers and the fellowship enjoyed by the participans and attendees exceeded expectations. Sapienta Press of Ave Maria University hopes that by disseminating these conference proceedings in book form, many others will also benefit from the wisdom, fidelity, and learning offered by each of the contributors.

In his highly-regarded Thomas Aquinas: A Historical and Philosophical Profile, while grasping fully that by profession and self-understanding Thomas Aquinas was formally a Christian theologian for whom philosophy as such was a noble artifact of an un-Christian past, Pasquale Porro demonstrates that nonetheless in each of his writings Thomas turned decisively to the ancient discipline, at the time embodied in the Arts faculty of the university, not only to ground and guide his reform of theological pedagogy but also, as a sage, to engage directly the complete system of profane sciences. Reflecting the highest standards of philological and textual scholarship (notably the decades-long research of the Leonine Commission) accompanied by judicious philosophic analysis, Porro lucidly exposes the salient philosophical issues in each of Thomas's writings, which he presents in chronological order and interprets within the parameters of the temporal circumstances and institutional imperatives of their composition and in respect of the authoritative texts that Thomas encountered. The clear translation of Porro's original Italian text by Joseph Trabbic and Roger Nutt will make his masterful study readily accessible to English-speaking students and enthusiasts of Thomas Aquinas, and will serve to refine and elevate their discourse about the medieval Dominican. - Kent Emery, Jr., University of Notre Dame