•  14
    A Thomistic Account of Virtue as Expertise
    Studies in Christian Ethics 36 (2): 254-273. 2023.
    A healthy Thomism is one engaged with the discoveries and challenges of other traditions and disciplines. In this article I argue for one way of integrating Thomistic ethics and recent work in psychology. I assert that Thomists should think of virtue as a kind of expertise, something that psychologists have studied for decades. First, I provide context and motivation for my integration project. Next, I offer a definition of expertise and contrast it with recent discussions of skill and Aristotle…Read more
  •  97
    Introduction: Special Issue on Contemporary Thomistic Psychology
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 157-162. 2022.
  •  764
    Correcting Acedia through Gratitude and Wonder
    Religions 458 (12): 1-15. 2021.
    In the capital vices tradition, acedia was fought through perseverance and manual labor. In this paper, I argue that we can also fight acedia through practicing wonder and gratitude. I show this through an account of moral formation developed out of the insight of the virtues and vices traditions that character traits affect how we see things. In the first section, I use Robert Roberts’s account of emotions to explain a mechanism by which virtues and vices affect vision and thus moral formation.…Read more
  •  21
    Virtue and the Psychology of Habit
    with Matthew Breuninger
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 291-315. 2022.
    An exciting trend in virtue ethics is its engagement with empirical psychology. Virtue theorists have connected virtue to various constructs in empirical psychology. The strategy of grounding virtue in the psychological theory of habit, however, has yet to be fully explored. Recent decades of psychological research have shown that habits are an indispensable feature of human life, and virtues and habits have a number of similarities. In this paper, we consider whether virtues are psychological h…Read more
  •  385
    Thomas Aquinas consistently defended the thesis that the separated rational soul that results from a human person’s death is not a person. Nevertheless, what has emerged in recent decades is a sophisticated disputed question between “survivalists” and “corruptionists” concerning the personhood of the separated soul that has left us with intractable disagreements wherein neither side seems able to convince the other. In our contribution to this disputed question, we present a digest of an unconsi…Read more
  •  26
    The Virtue of Somnience
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4): 611-637. 2020.
    It’s strange that sleep doesn’t come up more when we think of virtue. In this paper, I argue that there is a virtue concerned with sleep, which I call “somnience,” and I develop an account of this virtue. My account of somnience builds on the virtue tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas and recent research about the nature of sleep. In the first section I argue that there is a need for such a virtue. Next, I argue that somnience is a form of temperance. Third, I show how somnience connects to a num…Read more
  •  685
    A Perspectival Account of Acedia in the Writings of Kierkegaard
    with Jared Brandt and Derek McAllister
    Religions 80 (11): 1-23. 2020.
    Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In …Read more
  •  26
    Divine authority and the virtue of religion: a Thomistic response to Murphy
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 86 (3): 213-226. 2019.
    In his book, An Essay on Divine Authority, Mark Murphy argues that God does not have practical authority over created, rational agents. Although Murphy mentions the possibility of an argument for divine authority from justice, he does not consider any. In this paper, I develop such an argument from Aquinas’s treatment of the virtue of religion and other parts of justice. The divine excellence is due honor, and, as Aquinas argues, honoring a ruler requires service and obedience. Thus, a classical…Read more
  •  26
    The Virtual Presence of Acquired Virtues in the Christian
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 93 (1): 75-100. 2019.
    Aquinas’s doctrine that infused virtues accompany sanctifying grace raises many questions. We examine one: how do the infused virtues relate to the acquired virtues? More precisely, can the person with the infused virtues possess the acquired virtues? We argue for an answer consistent with and informed by Aquinas’s writings, although it goes beyond textual evidence, as any answer to this question must. There are two plausible, standard interpretations of Aquinas on this issue: the coexistence vi…Read more
  •  73
    The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilists?
    Journal of Analytic Theology 3 130-146. 2015.
    According to epistemic fallibilism, we cannot be certain of anything. According to the Christian tradition, faith comes with certainty. I develop this dilemma from recent accounts of fallibilism and various representatives of the Christian tradition. I then argue that on John Henry Newman's account of faith the dilemma is merely apparent. Finally, I develop Newman's account of the certainty that accompanies faith and is compatible with fallibilism.
  •  451
    The Acquired Virtues are Real Virtues
    Faith and Philosophy 32 (4): 453-470. 2015.
    In a recent paper, Eleonore Stump argues that Aquinas thinks the acquired virtues are “not real at all” because they do not contribute to true moral life, which she argues is the life joined to God by the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. Against this, I argue in two stages that Aquinas thinks the acquired virtues are real virtues. First, I respond to Stump’s four arguments against the reality of the acquired virtues. Second, I show four ways in which the acquired virt…Read more
  •  36
    Distinguishing Desire and Parts of Happiness
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1): 97-114. 2015.
    Germain Grisez has recently argued that Aquinas’s claim that God alone is our ultimate end is incompatible with other claims central to Aquinas’s account of happiness. Two of these arguments take their point of departure from Aquinas’s distinction between essential perfections and perfections of well-being. I argue that both of these arguments fail. The first, which argues that the distinction is incompatible with the beatific vision being perfect fulfillment, fails because it neglects a distinc…Read more
  •  15
    Ethics as a work of charity: Aquinas on pagan virtue (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (6): 1239-1241. 2017.