• Augustine and Philosophy
    with Johannes Brachtendorf, John D. Caputo, Jesse Couenhoven, Alexander R. Eodice, Wayne J. Hankey, John Peter Kenney, Gareth B. Matthews, Roland J. Teske, Frederick Van Fleteren, and James Wetzel
    Lexington Books. 2010.
    The essays in this book, by a variety of leading Augustine scholars, examine not only Augustine's multifaceted philosophy and its relation to his epoch-making theology, but also his practice as a philosopher, as well as his relation to other philosophers both before and after him. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today
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    The Problem with Evil
    with Joel Brown
    Philosophia Christi 19 (1): 59-81. 2017.
    The problem of evil typically allows the existence of evil to go unchecked. However, in order to be able to press the problem of evil against the theist, the skeptic must offer an account of evil. We examine several of these God-independent accounts and show how difficult it is to define evil without ultimately relying on the metaphysics of value that theism provides. On the other hand, according to the God-dependent account of evil that we endorse, God is logically and metaphysically antecedent…Read more
  •  42
    Reason and the Reasons of Faith (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 25 (2): 229-233. 2008.
  •  18
    Animal Subjects and Animal Rights
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (3): 499-504. 2022.
  •  15
    Expanding the Domain of Justice to Include Animals and Animal Rights
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (3): 473-484. 2022.
  •  22
    In this article, I show how traditional Thomistic claims about the creation and fall of the first human beings—or “Adam”—are compatible with the claims of evolutionary science concerning human origins. Aquinas claims that God created Adam in a state or condition of original justice, wholly subject to God and so fully virtuous, as well as internally immune to bodily corruption, suffering, and natural death. In defense of “Aquinas's Adam,” I first argue that affirming that the prelapsarian Adam wa…Read more
  •  166
    Schellenberg's Noseeum Assumption about Nonresistant Nonbelief
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion. forthcoming.
    In this article, I outline a strategy for challenging J.L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument, and specifically the premise within the argument that asserts the existence of what Schellenberg calls nonresistant nonbelief. Drawing on some of the philosophical resources of skeptical theism, I show how this premise is based on a particular “noseeum assumption”—what I call Schellenberg’s Noseeum Assumption—that underwrites a particular “noseeum argument.” This assumption is that, regarding putative …Read more
  •  24
    Acknowledging Animal Rights: A Thomistic Perspective
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1): 95-116. 2021.
    In this article, I show how it is possible, working from a Thomistic perspective, to affirm the existence of animal rights. To start, I show how it is possible to ascribe indirect rights to animals—in particular, the indirect right to not be treated cruelly by us. Then, I show how it is possible to ascribe some direct rights to animals using the same reasoning that Aquinas offers in defending the claim that animals have indirect rights. Next, I draw on elements of Aquinas’s metaphysical worldvie…Read more
  •  5
    Kent Dunnington. Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory
    Journal of Analytic Theology 8 (1): 721-725. 2020.
  •  17
    Hoping in the Face of Evil: A Theological Account
    Heythrop Journal 60 (5): 783-794. 2019.
    The Heythrop Journal, EarlyView.
  •  127
    A Realist Epistemology Of Faith
    Religious Studies 41 (4): 373-393. 2005.
    In this paper, I analyse and interpret Thomas Aquinas's account of faith in order to show how Thomistic faith is a veridical cognitive state that directs the mind to God, and consequently constitutes a distinct form of knowledge of God. By assenting to the revealed propositions of faith, and thereby forming true beliefs about God under the authority and guidance of God's grace, the possessor of faith comes to know or apprehend truly something about God, even if she fails to ‘see’ or know fully t…Read more
  • The aim of my dissertation is to exploit philosophical insights advanced by John McDowell in the contemporary analytic philosophy of mind in order to readdress a fundamental theological issue, viz. how persons can have knowledge of God, or more specifically, how God can transcend the mind but still remain known to the mind. Using Thomas Aquinas's theologically based theory of cognition and cognitive psychology as a model, I extend McDowell's main philosophical insight and claim that it is by bei…Read more
  •  1
    Direct realism and Aquinas's account of sensory cognition
    The Thomist 71 (3): 343-378. 2007.
    In this paper, I show how Thomas Aquinas's account of sensory cognition is undergirded by a strong commitment to direct realism. According to the specific form of direct realism I articulate and defend here, which I claim emerges from a proper study of Aquinas's account of sensory cognition, it is only by having sense experiences that possess definitive content--content that is isomorphic or formally identical with the sensible features of mind-independent reality--that we can be credited with o…Read more
  •  3
    Original justice, original sin, and the free-will defense
    The Thomist 74 (1): 105-141. 2010.
    In this article, I advance what I think is a more theologically robust and informed free-will defense, which allows me to address the problem of evil in a more theologically robust and informed way. In doing so, however, I do not claim to offer a comprehensive response to the problem of evil, or full-blown "theodicy"; instead, I offer a partial response, which I place in the service of a full-blown theodicy. Moreover, my own approach is explicitly Thomistic, insofar as I formulate much of it dra…Read more
  • Studying Christian Theology in the Secular University
    Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (4): 991-1024. 2010.
    In this article, I take my own position within an ongoing debate about what place (if any) Christian theology should have within the secular university. Against both “secularists” and “sectarians,” I argue that we can and should locate the study (teaching and learning) of theology squarely within the secular university, once we cease to demand that all academic study within the secular university be framed by a narrowly defined and overly constrictive “secular perspective.” Freed from the contro…Read more
  •  29
    God incarnate and the defeat of evil
    Modern Theology 25 (2): 159-185. 2009.
    In this essay, I assess Marilyn McCord Adams's important and provocative incarnation-centered approach to the problem of evil. In particular, I examine the central theological components of her approach: her novel but also problematic conceptions of creation, sin, redemption, grace, and eschatological consummation. My further goal is to use my critical analysis of Adams's approach in order to begin to articulate and defend an alternative incarnation-centered approach, based on a more classically…Read more
  •  14
    In this book, I argue that Christian theology belongs in the twenty-first-century secular university. In particular, I argue that Christian theology, so construed as a realist intellectual discipline that aims at producing and furthering knowledge of the divine, belongs in an inclusively secular, epistemologically pluralist university committed to promoting diverse and deep knowledge- and truth-seeking. Christian theology enhances truly liberal learning and provides a promising epistemic pathw…Read more
  •  20
    The eschatological character of our knowledge of God
    Modern Theology 22 (2): 255-276. 2006.
    In this essay, I show how Thomas Aquinas circumscribes epistemological questions concerning both the possibility and character of our knowledge of God within a larger eschatological framework that acknowledges the beatific vision as the ultimate good that we desire as well as the ultimate end for which we were created. Thus, knowledge of God is possible and actual on Aquinas's view because it is eternally rather than merely temporally indexed—that is, properly attributable to the blessed in heav…Read more
  •  40
    Analytic Theology: A Summary, Evaluation, and Defense
    Modern Theology 30 (1): 32-65. 2014.
    In this article I offer an extended, critical review of the analytic theology project. In the first part of the article, I investigate the origins and rise of analytic theology. I also offer some initial insights into the nature of analytic theology, based on some of what its chief proponents understand analytic theology to be. In the second part of the article, I summarize and evaluate some of the major contributions that already have been made within analytic theology. In the third and final s…Read more
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    Hell, the Problem of Evil, and the Perfection of the Universe
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (4): 603-628. 2015.
    In this article, I address the question why God would create a world with damned human beings in it when (presumably) he could create a better world without damned human beings. Specifically, I explain and defend what I call the “perfection of the universe argument.” According to this argument, which is Augustinian and Thomistic in origin, it is entirely and equally consistent with divine goodness for God to create a world with damned human beings in it or a damnation-free world so long as God e…Read more
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    The purpose of this article is to show the contribution of recent Thomistic epistemology - that is, an epistemology rooted in the philosophical theology of Thomas Aquinas - makes to contemporary philosophy of religion. In particular, I show how recent philosophers and theologians (most of them of a distinctly analytic persuasion) are appropriating insights in Aquinas’s philosophical theology in order to address perennial epistemological issues: most broadly, how it is that human persons know the…Read more
  •  18
    Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (review)
    Modern Theology 26 (4): 679-682. 2010.
  •  38
    There has been a distinct trend in modern thought to be deeply suspicious and critical of the human mind's ability to gain genuine access to any reality that transcends the world or the mind. As such, much modern reflection on the mind's relationship to a transcendent God has either banished God from the realm of the cognitively accessible or found ways to evacuate God of his transcendence, and reduce God to a concept or idea in the mind. In this book, I directly challenge negative modern unde…Read more
  •  5
    The Epistemology of Faith in Augustine and Aquinas
    In Phillip Cary, John Doody & Kim Paffenroth (eds.), Augustine and Philosophy, Lexington Books. pp. 167-196. 2010.
    In this essay, I discuss and defend Augustine’s and Aquinas’s respective epistemologies of faith. This entails analyzing central claims both thinkers make in order to determine the ways in which the true beliefs about God the faithful form and hold are reasonable as well as properly grounded. In the first two sections of the essay, I highlight what I take to be some of Augustine’s enduring epistemological insights concerning the reasonableness and origins of faith. I read Aquinas’s own account o…Read more