This essay argues that the new natural law theory propounds five errors that place it on a collision course with the traditional Thomistic understanding central to the moral magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. These root errors are argued to be the denial of the primacy of speculative over practical truth, the negation of unified normative natural teleology expressed in the NNLT doctrine of the putative “incommensurability” of basic goods prior to choice, failure to affirm the transcendence of the common (...) good, negation of the essentially theonomic character of the natural law, and the intentionalist construction of human action. The teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas is held to be a superior light for understanding Catholic moral life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 : 105–131. (shrink)

First principles and the challenge of Parmenidean monism -- St. Thomas on analogia entis in the Scriptum super sententiis and in De veritate -- Consideration of objections to the view that the analogia entis is the analogy of proper proportionality -- The analogy of being and the transcendence and analogical intelligibility of the act of faith.

This essay attempts concisely to articulate the necessary role played within moral theology in general—and within the moral theology of grace in particular—by the metaphysics and natural philosophy of human agency. It argues for the priority of the speculative with respect to the practical inasmuch as speculative knowledge precedes desire, and desire precedes intention; for the centrality of unified normative teleology; for the primacy of being over relation; and for the primacy of sound doctrine regarding the divine causal providence for (...) the moral theology of grace and freedom. (shrink)