Pascal stressed the importance of ‘reasons of the heart’ in leading us to God, and insisted that the God to whom he turned during his ‘night of fire’ on 23 November 1654 was ‘not the God of the philosophers and scholars’, but the God of the patriarchs and of Jesus Christ. This suggests a very different approach from that of Thomas, who characterises God in seemingly abstract terms, such as ‘being itself’ and ‘goodness itself’. This paper first explores the methodological and epistemological lessons to be drawn from Pascal’s notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ and argues that we have good reason to take them seriously. The second half of the paper discusses Aquinas’s apparently more impersonal conception of the deity, as an ‘infinite ocean of substance’ (John of Damascus) on which all things depend. But it then explores Aquinas’s account of the passage in Exodus where God addresses Moses in personal terms, and argues that this account, together with what Aquinas has to say on the subject of prayer, indicates that the God of his philosophical deliberations can indeed be reconciled with the intensely personal God of Scripture to whom Pascal turned during his night of fire.

An interesting aspect of the Nicene Creed is that it asks its adherents to not only affirm their belief in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit but also their belief in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The call to believe in the Church raises at least two interrelated questions: (1) What does it mean for the Church to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic? (2) What ought to be the nature of the Christian’s faith in the Church? This paper explores these two questions by drawing on Anselm of Canterbury’s ecclesiology and his well-known approach to the relationship between faith and reason, fides quaerens intellectum. While many have discussed the importance of faith seeking understanding for Anselm as it pertains to God, this paper will focus on how Anselm’s understanding of the interworking of belief and understanding can help us think about what it means to believe in the Church.

Recent debates in moral philosophy have placed significant emphasis on personal conscience, often elevating individual autonomy above all other considerations. This overemphasis has paradoxically led to the suppression of another’s conscience in situations where two moral agents must act together toward a shared goal, as in the physician–patient relationship. Critics of conscientious objection argue that recognizing its legitimacy fosters moral relativism or subjectivism. How, then, can conscience be properly formed and understood in a way that safeguards against relativism while upholding its rightful role in conscientious objection? This article argues that Aquinas’s integration of natural moral law, conscience, prudence, and virtue offers the most coherent and original framework for addressing these challenges. By grounding conscience in truth and sustaining it through virtue, Aquinas provides a robust basis for defending conscientious objection while safeguarding human dignity and moral integrity. While primarily theoretical, this study also draws practical implications for healthcare and institutional ethics, showing how a Thomistic understanding of virtue and conscience can inform dialogue and policy in pluralistic contexts.

For the most part, the ongoing Thomistic debate over the nature of lying presupposes that speech has one primary end: to reveal the speaker’s mind or soul. Within this framework, a lie is disordered speech. In this paper, I formulate a polyvalent Thomistic theory of speech acts that affirms that human vocalizations have multiple ends in the order of nature, including functions that do not involve signification, a claim supported by evidence from studies of primate vocalization and by evidence from studies of contemporary speech act theory in the philosophy of language. With this theory in hand, I propose that not every deliberately willed spoken falsehood constitutes a lie, including false claims made to enemy spies and Nazi officers, because not every spoken falsehood involves disordered speech.

William Blake’s theology is expressed in a strange, idiosyncratic idiom that is difficult to pin down. Sometimes Blake is even read as an anti-Christian, proto-Nietzschean thinker. However, in 1910, Chesterton noted Blake’s unusual ‘tenderness’ toward the Catholic faith and even suggested that he was already on the path toward Catholicism. In this paper, I present an interpretation of Blake’s theology, focusing on his early work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and on the ‘fetters’ that he attributes to Milton, implying that he is free of them. I argue that Blake is a sincere Christian – and, as Chesterton suggested, far closer to Catholicism than one might expect. Blake’s profound and insightful reflection on the epistemological and psychological effects of original sin forge a middle way, akin to that of Catholicism, between a ‘Pelagian’ belief in the ability of human beings to redeem themselves through their own efforts and a Calvinist insistence on humanity’s total postlapsarian depravity.

This essay proposes that the relationship between synodality and sacramental participation runs deep – so deep that one cannot be understood apart from the other. This is to say that there is no synodality apart from an understanding of synodality’s sacramental foundations and its own sacramental character and that the economy of sacramental grace cannot be fully realized by and within the ecclesial community without its fuller integration of synodal journeying together.

This paper explores the epistemic foundations of empathy and intersubjectivity in Edith Stein’s analysis, placing it in dialogue with Pope Francis’s reflections on the heart in his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos. Beginning with Stein’s development of empathy, the author examines how empathy grants us an awareness of the other’s inner experience, which is non-primordially present and foreign to the empathizing subject. While this structure reveals a fundamental asymmetry between self and other, it also leads Stein’s account of empathy to an epistemic insufficiency: it can describe the givenness of the other, but not the depth of relational life. At this insufficiency, I turn to Pope Francis’ notion of the heart as a lived space of spiritual life. The heart, in this vision, is where contradictions and polar tensions between self and other are not solved but held – a space of receptivity, affectivity, and interior openness. Drawing on the image of bamboo that survives precisely through its emptiness, I suggest that a spiritually receptive heart allows us to live in the asymmetrical experiences between self and without collapsing the other into abstraction.