* Previous issues of The Thomist can be accessed electronically through Project Muse. 

Special Issue: "Thomas Aquinas and Racial Justice"


Volume 89, Number 2 (April 2025) 


Articles


Abstract: This essay examines how Aquinas’s philosophical psychology can suggest a way of analyzing the phenomenon of implicit bias. On the account sketched here, implicit bias should be understood, not as a submerged or unconscious belief, but as a pre-rational imaginative frame that may or may not accord with our intellectual beliefs. Such imaginative frames are common features of our experience, and they arise from a habituation of the cogitative power in tandem with imagination and memory. The essay explains how this notion works in Aquinas’s philosophical psychology, how it can be applied to provide an account of implicit bias, and why (given Aquinas’s account of justice) we are morally obligated to remediate our implicit biases wherever possible. The final sections offer a Thomistic response to the objection that “sometimes the stereotype is true,” and return to Aquinas’s philosophical psychology to identify some strategies for remediating implicit biases.


Abstract: This article examines the Thomistic conception of equity (aequitas) and its implications for contemporary debates on justice, particularly racial justice. While modern discourse often employs equity ambiguously, Thomas Aquinas provides a structured, twofold framework integrating equity not only as the virtue of epieikeia, but within the broader context of distributive justice. Aquinas’s insights emphasize that equitable judgment must account for human rights and historical conditions. Furthermore, discussions of equity require attention to diverse social structures, including but not limited to modern democratic frameworks. Ultimately, Aquinas’s account, grounded in divine wisdom, demonstrates that any appeal to justice or equity presupposes an underlying moral order, offering a foundational perspective for addressing modern concerns of racial justice. Yet, finding equity in contentious racial disputes demands another essential prerequisite: virtue. The virtues and vices Aquinas highlights reveal the moral conditions that enable or thwart the search for genuine equity.


Abstract: This article makes a case for why human equality and the wrongness of racism are best accounted for by the philosophical anthropology derived from Thomistic Essentialism. After presenting this view and explaining its contemporary application in the American civil rights struggle, the author briefly reviews three major secular alternatives: Ruse and Wilson’s Darwinian account; Rawlsian social contract theory; and Dworkinian ungrounded realism. He shows how the advocates of each, in their own way, rely on notions that are more at home with Thomistic Essentialism, even though each is offered by its champions as a way to ground human equality without appealing to the sort of rich metaphysical and theistic beliefs that Thomistic Essentialism entails and King and his allies took for granted.


Abstract: Recent retrievals of Thomas Aquinas on pagan political virtue have generated creative commentary and exegesis for Christian ethics. This article examines the retrieval of pagan virtue discourse among sixteenth-century Spanish humanists and theologians who inhabited the Spanish Atlantic empire and debated the “affair of the Indies.” The historical turn to the New World conquests demonstrates how the racial pride endemic to classical pagan virtue became a matter of dispute pitting an Aristotelian ethic of magnanimity against a Thomistic ethic of charity. The interpretive dispute about pagan virtue between the Spanish humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Spanish Dominican theologians concerned whether Augustine’s City of God presented the Roman Empire as a model for heroic virtue or a tyranny of splendid vice. This article considers the distinct political uses of pagan virtue in medieval and early modern political thought with focus on the opposition to the natural racial hierarchy of pagan political virtue by Dominicans Bartolomé de las Casas, Melchor Cano, and Domingo de Soto. Their Thomistic approach with legal and humanist inflections, at once capaciously Aristotelian yet critically Augustinian, further conceptualizes pagan virtue for contemporary Christian ethics and points toward more theological approaches to racial justice and racial solidarity.


Abstract: This article uncovers connections between Thomas Aquinas’s teachings on prayer and the religious experiences and practices of enslaved African Americans, which were expressed in sacred songs called “spirituals.” It encourages theologians in the Thomistic tradition to understand and appreciate the significance of this Black spiritual tradition, while learning something from its particular desires for deliverance in the midst of oppression. The article begins by confronting the difficult legacy of Aquinas’s views on slavery, then seeks a better way forward by interpreting Aquinas’s teachings on prayer in light of the slave spirituals, and vice versa. Ultimately, it suggests that, just as Aquinas bridged Athens and Jerusalem by creatively integrating Greek philosophy with Christian Scripture and tradition, so too today we can bridge Thomistic scholarship and the study of Black religion by exploring shared spiritual commitments and practices between them.


Abstract: Aquinas distinguishes two senses of courage: as direct attack against evil, especially evil that threatens justice, and as a form of endurance in the face of evil that cannot easily or quickly be overcome. In the Black intellectual tradition, particularly in the writings Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, there is sustained reflection on the role and nature of courage in response to injustice. This essay lays out Aquinas’s position and then put it in conversation with leading thinkers in the Black intellectual tradition and shows that both traditions can benefit from comparative analysis. It turns out that the significance of philosophical insights (from Aquinas) marginalized in the modern world can be highlighted by reflecting on the thought of marginalized traditions in the modern world.


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